s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]
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Books:
society
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1646145135
| 9781646145133
| 1646145135
| 3.59
| 882
| Jan 09, 2023
| Apr 01, 2025
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really liked it
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The waking nightmare of survival horror while hunted by mysterious beasts was not the teen dream of 13 year old Abdi. Yet, along with his 5 year old s
The waking nightmare of survival horror while hunted by mysterious beasts was not the teen dream of 13 year old Abdi. Yet, along with his 5 year old sister Alva, he’ll have to trod a treacherous path to safety as the death throes of society plunge the world into unsettling silence. Beasts, the YA monster horror from Norwegian author Ingvild Bjerkeland, is a quietly ferocious tale told with maddening tension and atmosphere as humanity falls prey not only to the violent beasts leaving a path of death and destruction but also to its own foibles as ‘selfishness spreads like wildfire.’ This slim novel delivers chills thrice its own weight with a translation into English by Rosie Hedger that is as sharp as the claws claiming lives across the countryside and as sparse as the hopes left for humanity. Like a cross between
A Quiet Place
and The Road by Cormac McCarthy for a middle-grade audience, Beasts is hauntingly upsetting and while it may be a bit predictable with a rushed second half, I suspect this will give some sleepless, white-knuckled reading nights to its target audience. What works best in the novel, however, is the sense of ambiguity that lends itself to near-allegorical assessment painting in broad strokes that contain a multitude of metaphorical meanings. Beasts is a thrilling—if perhaps occasionally generic survival horror—and uneasy read where, as the old world bleeds out and the new one aches into existence, tenderness and small acts of kindness might be what lights the beacons of hope to navigate uncertain futures. ‘It felt wrong running away from people—from a warm house with food—and into a forest where beasts hunted us. But something bad was bound to happen if we stayed, I could feel it in my bones.’ Bjerkeland’s Beasts is already a hit in her homeland of Norway, having been voted by readers for the highest bookseller award and nominated for the Nordic Council Children and YA prize and it is easy to see why this book resonates so well. This frenetic fable-like tale, or parable perhaps, on the horrors that lurk within the human heart as well as external evils stalking the lands arrives squarely between survival horror and contemporary dystopia and, despite a few quick nods to the now defunct cellphones in a world where the electric grid has failed, has a sense of timelessness to it. The brother and sister duo have fled their home after witnessing their own mother devoured by the titular beasts, but few can be trusted as men have taken up arms to protect their stockpiles of goods, including former family friends who changed ways after ‘Kai persuaded him that the world isn’t what it once was, that the normal rules no longer apply.’ Hungry, tired, and with Alva struggling with sickness, their only hope is to reach the coast (very The Road, mind you) and hope to reach their father who is working offshore. And so they set off toward the end of the world as the world around them ends. ‘The fear was like an enormous black bird within me. It beat its wings in panic.’ There is a rather sweet dynamic between the siblings here, with Alva’s innocence offsetting Abdi’s anxiety and grief. Not unlike the way the small kindnesses and moments of innocence in the boy from The Road represents a sort of hope, so too do the actions of these kids reflect a hope for humanity. While the prose here is quite sparse and direct—it reflects the frenzied nature of their predicament and the snap-judgement decisions they are forced to endure—Abdi’s inner dialogue bends towards the poetic in the quiet moments when he is able to reflect on his fears and aspirations. ‘Alva was my responsibility now,’ Abdi considers, ‘I had to look after her; I had to make sure she had whatever she needed to survive.’ This sense of duty to others, even at one’s own expense which is also reflected by Lucy late in the novel, is in stark contrast to the cruelty and selfishness depicted by the adults like Kai. And in this sense of duty there is an inner strength that allows Abdi and Alva to press on in the many moments of sheer terror. ‘The fear within me had neatly folded back its wings and tucked them in, at rest,’ Abdi thinks, swallowing fear. ‘If only someone, somewhere could tell me what to do.’ The depiction of teens who find themselves rudderless in a crumbling world takes a shape that stretches beyond the confines of the dystopian narrative to nudge reflection of our own times in which the adult world has failed the youths. Climate crisis, political violence, wars, and more can be read into this and the adults taking up arms to rob each other and defend their territories instead of working together against the hoard of beasts. Depictions of stores still operating despite the chaos and lack of supplies might recall the scenes of “essential workers” going about like normal during the pandemic and Abdi’s depiction of the slow, surreal slide into the slaughterhouse of his present reflects the general numbness one might experience seeing major world events occurring at a distance on the news: ‘I’d seen the news about the attack: hazy pictures and shaky cellphone footage. Large creatures entering the railway station in the middle of morning rush hour, or a shopping center, or an office building. Nobody knew who they were or where they’d come from. They were described by one reporter as bears., while another claimed they were terrorists dressed up in animal costumes. One witness claimed they were aliens, which had prompted laughter from the journalist. Once the attacks begin, chaos ensues, the government and military fail to protect the citizens, power grids fail, and eventually society itself collapses. ‘All of our systems have failed,’ we are told and one must recognize that normalcy is a frail and fragile state. ‘The beasts had reached us in the end.’ Most impactful, I found, was the ambiguity around the beasts themselves which gives them a sense of existing more as a symbolism for cruelty than anything else. The ambiguity of the novel and the relative non-ending (which is ripe for a sequel though one is certainly not needed) imply the point is more the abstraction of the allegory than a narrative cohesion. Concrete conclusiveness would spoil the dynamic symbolism anyhow. One on hand we can take the beasts as direct fact. We don’t know where they come from, what they are, and we only get a few glimpses of their horrifying form. Yet peppered throughout the novel are several off-hand comments about them possibly being an invasion disguised as animals. One can dismiss this, or consider the metaphor. We witness a beast act like a human at a doorway performing trickery and the idea of people adorned in animal skin recalls ancient warfare of animal skin armor and battle costume. There is also a moment when Abdi finds maps on a wall with strike zones circled—the beasts entered the major cities first out of nowhere—and red arrows to show their slow spread across Europe not unlike troop movements. One might be reminded of the slow creep of fascism or the Nazi invasions across Europe (Norway, for instance, was invaded on April 9th, 1940). The beasts take on a dynamic metaphor of human cruelty, fascism, or any sort of vague evil interpretation, which is ultimately more frightening than a beast we can see and recognize. ‘But Alva was standing beside me, small and scared inside the enormous raincoat, and if I didn’t save her, I’d never forgive myself. Then all would be truly lost.’ Ingvild Bjerkeland’s Beasts is a truly unsettling YA horror with layers of implications and left open for interpretation. While the latter portion, particularly the climax, seems a bit rushed and many of the major plot points are rather predictable (if not altogether cliche), this is coming from an adult perspective and will likely seem fresher and more frightening to the novel’s target audience. It is a quick read and at 120 pages I read it in a single sitting, eagerly and feverishly flipping pages fully locked in to the children’s trials and tribulations on their fraught journey to freedom and safety. A crisp and chilling book, Beasts blends horror and dystopian collapse for a thrill ride and confronts us with the question of who is the more monstrous: the beasts or our fellow humans? 3.5/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 12, 2025
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Jun 13, 2025
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Jun 12, 2025
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Hardcover
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0593701569
| 9780593701560
| 0593701569
| 3.91
| 7,538
| Oct 31, 2024
| Feb 04, 2025
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really liked it
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‘Because if you aren’t unsettled, then there’ll be no sublime.’ Am I a person or am I just a stack of algorithmic data in a trench coat? And if ‘data i ‘Because if you aren’t unsettled, then there’ll be no sublime.’ Am I a person or am I just a stack of algorithmic data in a trench coat? And if ‘data is the new oil’ as data science entrepreneur Clive Humby said, are my consumer habits worth more than my humanity as corporate donations increasingly give CEOs unfettered access to politicians? Showing how the gap is rapidly shrinking between what was once far-flung futures in the cautionary sci-fi tales of yesteryears and our daily anxious present—almost as fast as the financial gap between rich and poor is widening—comes Gliff, Ali Smith’s first novel since her outstanding Seasonal Quartet. Full of razor-sharp social criticism and rebellious sentiments that skillfully balance the personal and political, Smith is as poetically profound and engaging as ever through her sagacious wit and wordplay. Gliff hits close to home, and hard. Set just a stone’s throw away from our present, Smith takes us through her bleakly portrayed ‘brave new unlibraried world’ alongside young siblings Briar and Rose (their joint namesake of Sleeping Beauty playfully nudging the notion on having to “get woke” and their burgeoning revolutionary praxis) left on their own in an unfamiliar town as they witness firsthand the horrors of society sliding into authoritarianism and sweeping out the unwanted. The unhoused, immigrants, whistleblowers, protestors and more all find themselves labeled “Unverifiables” and sought for arrest in this near-future that feels a natural step from Smith’s previous Brexit novels. Language, and the political and corporate erasure of co-opting of it, takes center stage in the world of Gliff where your data places you into oppressive government categories that defines your life. This story of siblings on the run with a stolen horse through a surveillance society isn’t quite a dystopian novel, yet is eerily prescient nonetheless and Gliff becomes a brave new world (as well as a riff on the famous novel by Aldous Huxley) and scathing examination on our present culture of online data, nationalistic fear mongering, and corporate control. It is heart wrenching yet encouraging as Smith guides us to consider the meaning of words consider freedom and how we ascribe meaning to our existence, shows how hope is found in defying authority and asks us to consider the ills of society in hopes we can ‘solve it by salving it.’ ‘Every classic old horse story I’ve ever chanced upon in this brave new unlibraried world deals with the bloodiness of humanity to other creatures as well as each other and more often than not ends in dutiful sadness as if the story, not totally broken, is at least broken in.’ Always the linguistic maestro, Smith demonstrates how language truly is ‘the tool of the tools,’ as sociologist Lev Vygotsky wrote, to find logical footholds in reality to understand, assess, and communicate the world around us. Yet, if ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,’ as Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, how does one combat an authoritarian society that stifles language, bans books and public education, co-opts the words of resistance, gives a corporate rebranding to terms, and removes the language to speak out? Such questions are a common theme for Smith, who recently addressed this in an article for The Guardian about the Sacco Gang: ‘Truth doesn’t stop being truth and justice doesn’t stop being justice just because powerful people or politics or institutions tell lies.’ Yet what avenues for truth and resistance are available when a corporate police State controls the meaning of words at will and their legal application such as in Gliff? When, say, an industry plant uses the government office to restrict the speech of private citizens, such as cowering from democratic congressional procedure to sign an executive order against fact checking or educating about misinformation. ‘Why do you think they call it a net? Why do you think they call it a web?’ In Smith’s novel Summer, it is questioned if such control of language can even limit our imaginations and actions. Charlotte, an optimistic young activist responds: ‘it depends what you can imagine. And that does tend to depend on the Zeitgeist of the time, and who and what are influencing a mass imagination.’ Smith takes dead aim at corporate social media—think Elon Musk using Twitter to manipulate algorithms to bolster right wing rhetoric—and they way average citizens become the product in marketing manipulation. Briar (or Bri) and Rose’s mother warns them away from the internet and the pitfalls of online propaganda: ‘Social media could do all sorts of good things but that too many people—and more, too many powerful systems—used it vindictively.’ In their present society, all people have a sort of Smartwatch that tracks their every move, people go around questioning each other and entering in their data, cameras and microphones lurk on every corner amassing endless surveillance and data. It is what social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff coined as ‘Instrumentarianism’ in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: ‘[Instrumentarianism is] the social relations that orient the puppet masters to human experience as surveillance capital wields the machines to transform us into means to others’ market ends.’ Or, simply put, power to monitor, manipulate, predict, and profit off what you can and can’t see or experience online. Zuboff warns that this push from tech companies along with increasingly getting into bed with government financially and through government contracts (typically surveillance) is leading to a government ruled by tech profits and full social surveillance in every aspect of our lives. Public and private, which has already occurred at the onset of this novel. ‘God help me, what can one woman do against the behemoth…’ ‘There are different realities,’ their mother says, ‘and the net is a reality with designs on general reality, and I’ll prefer it if you both experience the real realities as your foremost realities.’ While Briar may try to defend technological advances, such as AI allowing us to read scrolls that would otherwise ‘fall apart if you tried to open them into nothing but ashes,’ the mother replies we should all pay more attention ‘to what history tells us rather than all this endless congratulating ourselves for finding a new way to read it.’ She considers smartphones to be ‘liabilities,’ causing you to see the world ‘through it’ and not the real world (Mary Oliver would love this detail) which has marked the children as outsiders and threatening curiosity to everyone else. It makes for some of the most charming moments in the book, particularly with Rose—headstrong and charismatic—and the local boy Colon who views questioning people as his honorable duty. The siblings refusal to provide straightforward answers are less a look at deception and more a rather comedic gap in the general sense of the world and how to live within it. There is often a fine line between lies and storytelling and the latter, particularly with Rose, becomes a way to brush aside the veneer of State framing and see the mechanisms underneath. ‘Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?.’ What is marketing but storytelling, and fiction, especially rebellious fiction full of social criticisms, is a way to counteract the corporate narrative. Smith once worked as an advertising copywriter and her books frequently lampoons the language of marketing as a method for control, such as in Girl Meets Boy when a company polluting the river that is the only source of water spins language to turn the public opinion on the local water protectors into terrorists. She discusses in an interview with NPR about how the term “slogan” is connected to the English word “slughorn” from the Gaelix “sluggern” or “war cry.” It is essentially a corporate battle cry. But fiction allows us to subvert their narratives, as she explains: ‘There is a kind of truth that can't be said any other way. I think it finds a way to say the things which are either inarticulable or being stopped from being said or are very, very, very difficult to articulate. I love that about fiction. It is ever, ever hopeful, regardless of its sometimes very dark subject matter.’ This is a dark novel indeed, but one that is full of hope. Those in power know nothing of hope, only profits, and the characters find fighting for a future where ‘people can be free of being made to be what data says they are’ is a hopeful outlook. ‘Does it make it easier to control other creatures, or even peoples, us deciding that because we don’t know what they’re saying, what they’re saying doesn’t get to mean anything, or that they don’t get to have a say?’ Gliff exists in the slide to a dystopia of sorts, though the mechanisms of authoritarianism are at a remove from the narrative and are only glimpsed through their effect on people and society. Smith centers humanity, and focusing on the human hurt and human narrative being ground down by dehumanization only serves to emphasize the cold inhumanity of authoritarianism. With discussions on whistleblowers vanishing and deregulations helping a weed-killer corporation lie about their ingredients, cover up their harm, and continue unimpeded, Smith suggests this is an authoritarian rule where the line between corporations and the State has dissolved. It is what Anne Applebaum terms the titular Autocracy, Inc. where instead of one strongman dictator we have a more corporate authoritarianism: ‘An agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power…[through] sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structure, a complex of security service…and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation.’ It is a system that ‘structures much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures.’ Sort of like that online joke I often think about featuring a tech company eagerly announcing they’ve finally invented “The Torment Nexus” from a sci-fi author’s cautionary novel “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.” In a present Right from the start, Smith highlights how the social class divide has gotten to an extreme where the rich and powerful no longer even see the poor. ‘It was like they all had their backs to me, even the ones facing me,’ Bri observes, ‘their disconnect was what elegant meant.’ In this dystopia corporations are shoving down our throats, poverty is conflated with an absence of patriotism, to be outside the profit mechanisms of the elite is to be a blight on the nation, and so language comes in to erase these people such as the re-education “ARCs” where those confined are referred to as “animals.” And it is through the examinations of language where Smith really shines. ‘Weeds are just flowers or plants that people have decided to call weeds because people decide they don’t want them there.’ Words and the control of their meaning are central to Gliff and Rose bantering with Bri saying ‘You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life’ becomes an overall theme about society. A person can suddenly become termed “Unverifiable” and taken to re-education labor camps and in a ‘worded world’ where you are your data you are easily erasable. And what is a name but ‘another word for ownership’ (elbows Ayn Rand in the ribs for her Anthem novel championing “freedom” ending with the man naming the woman). The character arcs are not unlike a lesson in semiotics, one where they must realize a word points to a thing but is not the thing. Rose argues a passport doesn’t prove she’s her, ‘we prove a passport’s it.’ Bri considers how a former pet existed independent of its name: ‘So there was the word that made the name, and there was the dog that it conjured in the mind, and there, way beyond it, totally free of it himself, was the real dog, wagging or not wagging his tail. It was me who was tethered to the word.’ And then there is the issue of naming the horse, the titular Gliff of the novel, and Bri considers ‘was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found—or even founded—in the world because of no words?’ There is an excellent moment in the novel when Bri learns the term “polysemous” while discovering Rose has given the horse a name ‘ that can stand in for, or represent, any other word, any word that exists. Or ever existed.’ It is a possible path to freedom. ‘Because of what you called him, he can be everything and anything. And at the same time his name can mean nothing at all. It’s like you’ve both named him and let him be completely meaning-free!’ One can be erased, but there is also a sense that one can escape the confines of State categorization and data sets. Or eluding categorization such as the rather well integrated aspect on Bri existing outside the socially-enforced idea of gender binaries. When asked ‘are you a boy or a girl’ they reply ‘Yes I am’ and are warned that is ‘either very brave of you or very stupid, given recent developments in history.’ Though not existing in defined meaning is a double-edged sword, such as late in the novel when Bri must learn ‘what power can do…the artistry and the discipline it takes to humiliate,’ and face experiences where ‘words first ceased to mean and where, for words, I first ceased to mean too.’ The power of the State, the power of patriarchy, and the power of cruelty knows no humanity. ‘A lot of people are threatened by knowing that people who they think aren’t anything like them exist.’ I swear this novel is hopeful. In life, hope arrives from defying authority, where small but visible acts of defiance show the system is not impenetrable. We see how when you fight for the oppressed, those in power treat you like the oppressed, but in such a society ‘to be innocent in the eyes of the State is to be guilty’ as journalist Chris Hedges said in a recent speech at the Workers Strike Back conference. You will live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension but you must also stand against them, even in small ways such as Bri discovering that theory is words that can be used against you but praxis, like toppling the eviction machine over and destroying property, signals hope. And that legality and morality are often not congruous as the marketing would have us believe. Smith has always had a fiery undercurrent of resistance and it feels all the more direct and dire here. ‘The person he turned into a mound of nothing but rubble, nothing but smoke and ask, is the opposite of destroyed. His opponent is everywhere. His opponent is everything.’ I have such a deep love for the work of Ali Smith and Gliff is another wonderful work. With a sharp aim at social ills, abuses of power, the hatred and fear that leads to control, oppression and erasure, and that language is often at the center of political manipulation, Smith shows how storytelling can wrestle back control of the narrative and praxis breeds hope. Smith has promised a ‘sister novel’ next year, Glyph, which will ‘tell a story hidden in the first novel,’ though she won’t say much about it as she mentioned in a recent interview: ‘If I do, the unwritten book will run off like a creature in the wild that's seen me see it.’ I can’t wait for the book to emerge from the wild and onto bookshelves. Gliff is a marvelous and nuanced book full of linguistic brilliance, a stern warning for the present, and a desperate hope for the future. 4.5/5 ‘Wait for me, you little revolutionary.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 11, 2025
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Mar 11, 2025
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Mar 11, 2025
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Hardcover
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0063224348
| 9780063224346
| 0063224348
| 4.71
| 58
| unknown
| Sep 03, 2024
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it was amazing
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In a world where the shape of borders and government paperwork divides, objectifies, vilifies, and often erases people, ‘Poetry travels beyond the bor
In a world where the shape of borders and government paperwork divides, objectifies, vilifies, and often erases people, ‘Poetry travels beyond the borders that documentation reifies in our thinking.’ Tobi Kassim, an undocumented poet living in the United States, finds poetry to be a pathway to a voice, to be recognized in ways passport or citizenship papers could never reach. Here To Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora’ is an moving and insightful anthology edited by “the undocupoets” Janine Joseph, Esther Lin, and Marcelo Hernández Castillo to highlight the experience of under-documented people, show they are just as valid and creative a force in contemporary poetry as those with citizenship paperwork, and invite readers to understand their lives. As Jose Felipe Ozuna write, ‘poetry is a place where I don’t have to make concessions,’ and the poems collected here hit hard with their bold and vibrant prose. Alongside their poetry, each writer is given a space to discuss what poetry or being undocumented means to them, creating a brilliant and multifaceted tapestry of poetic investigation and understanding. From recognizable names like Javier Zamora, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, or José Olivarez to dozens more equally exquisite poets, this is a gorgeous collection full of heartaches and passion that speaks to crucial issues going on today in the United States. Feeding Finches —Janel Pineda Ever since the foreclosure notice was posted on our front door, my father has been feeding finches. Palming safflower seeds and shelled corn and white proso millet into a makeshift feeder by my sister's plants.The finches come in flocks, bowing before food. My father watches them take turns wing-bathing in the dog bowl before flying off. He lets them go, knowing they'll return, knowing he'll feed them again. What else is a man's worth, but the promise of seeds he offers his children? What else but the halo of a roof he secures atop their heads? The poets in this anthology are born all over the world but have found themselves in the United States without citizenship and want to share their stories like anyone else despite commonly facing a sense of erasure for their legal status. Poems on DACA, American grammar books, missing documents, crossing the border at 4 years old, family (‘the difference between a ricer and a creek is that / from a creek, no new branches are formed’ writes Patrycja Humienik), and more fill these pages in order to give their stories and memories a voice. ‘I commit myself to memory as an act of revolt,’ says Mico Astrid on their poetry, but continues to add their work is ‘to invite readers to ask “why is it like this?” and to someday arrive at an answer that propels us collectively closer, and forward.’ Because the world is a frightening place for those without legal documentation. At the time of writing this in March 2025, ICE agents have increased arrests on undocumented people by 627% under the Republican regime, arresting more than 23,000 people and deporting 18,000 in just the past month. Cowering from democratic processes like congressional approval behind executive orders that have largely been blocked in courts for being unconstitutional, Donald Trump has attempted to end birthright citizenship and upend immigration laws to revoke freedoms and rights for those not born by chance within the tax law boundaries of the United States. ‘To confess my being is to risk my safety,’ Elmo Tumbokon admits, and these poems become a brace space that, in the face of personal danger, the poets remind us they exist just like the rest of us. ‘My poems present the reader with a choice: come here and sit with me or choose not to be implicated, to remain on the outside, eavesdropping.’ —Jane Kuo Sociologist Everett Hughes coined the term “master status,” poet Aline Mello explains, to name a ‘primary identity that affects every aspect of one’s life and determines their future trajectory.’ Mello confesses ‘I cannot separate my work from my undocumented identity,’ and through each poets statements we see how their documentation status becomes writ large on their lives due to governmental forces and societal gatekeeping. It follows them everywhere and having to worry about deportations or abuse is a constant worry as many poets admit. ‘Attention to detail is a survivor’s trait’ writes Esther Lin, ‘will you marry me is one question / will you report me is the other.’ But there are also rather moving looks at how poetry is a way to assess themselves and the world around them. Leticia Priebe Rocha sees poetry as ‘an art of acute observation and listening,’ and ‘a poem is a window, a mirror, or a door,’ writes Wo Chan. But Wo Chan also reminds us ‘to have a body is to be a window, mirror, and door, all at once and one to all,’ and we see poetry as a further way of understanding identity but also social transformation: ‘[P]oetry is language fantasy, a wish made into expression, the same way that drag is the fantasy of the body. Not just what is possible, but against that which is forbidden. A poem transforms paper into hope; drag transforms the body into great beauty and pride, despite social and political op-pression. Both require massive effort. Both can be- not just expressions -but visceral assertions for societal transformation. And both declare: "My name is ________ and I have something to say." It is a beautiful way to think of poetry and I love the ideas on possibility here. Saul Hernandez uses surrealism in his work in order to ‘question truth and seek answers’ because, he has learned ‘sometimes to survive we must transform ourselves into objects or creatures defying logic—to write toward the realms of possibilities.’ It is change through language, though Claudia Rojas writes that language is ‘not a definite or final verdict on my life’ and in many of these poems we see how language can be a tricky place for identity, especially those brought up between two languages, cultures, places. For instance, Wamgeci Gitau’s poem I Love You addresses ‘the unnamed loss of lovers speaking in colonial language’ ‘I found myself using those words as a placebo for things I could not say like “how are you so desperate to belong when everything looks and smells like you” and “why me? Why do you need to hear this from me?” I used the word “love” when I had nothing else. We were young in the universe. We were young to each other. We only had “love” in English’ A poem that really knocked me out and has lingered with me is Jorge Quintana’s The poem where ants are immigrants and I am the US which looks at issues of violent gatekeeping: ‘sometimes when I kill ants I feel guilty Because I’m an immigrant yet I feel justified to Pass mortal judgement on those I consider Trespassers in my home’ He doesn’t ‘blame the ants / for wanting to survive / their winter even if / if it means dying at / my boot’ but the speaker is fearful if they cross paths again the ants might ‘show me the same kindness…I carry the murder of entire colonies. // God dead God, / will I be forgiven for all the ants I’ve killed?’ I’m reminded of the notion that the white hegemony is fearful of anyone not like them having a share of society using fear tactics to further enforce “Othering” because the fear is that they would be treated the way they had historically treated others. The real sadness here is that people just want to exist and are oppressed, often violently, out of a sense of shame for having been violent and hurtful. There are a wide variety of poems in this collection and I really appreciate the innovation. There are rather creative formats and the anthology does an excellent job of editing. A standout were the poems of Vanessa Angelica Villarreal, who uses spreadsheets such as the internal ICE spreadsheet made public in May 2020: ‘If ICE’s spreadsheet is meant to deny bodies through abstraction in language, then this poem listens for the body denied, the voice refusing disconnection, abstraction, disappearance.’ Just as people come in many shapes, sizes, colors, and more, so do these poems and it is a wonderful reminder that inclusivity, acceptance and plurality is a way towards strength while gatekeeping leaves everything dull and decaying. ‘My father calls me his American dream, I suppose I am to live like a kind of evidence.’ —Patrycja Humienik Here to Stay is an outstanding anthology and one I will return to often. It is a reminder that the socially enforced divisions created by documents and borders are a frail and false dichotomy used to separate us and distract from our shared humanity. Poetry is a great source for those who bear witness and those who want to give voice to the voiceless and this anthology does a marvelous job of being a platform for just that. 5/5 Let me be lawless and beloved, Ungovernable and unafraid. Let me be brave enough to live here. Let me be precise in my actions. Let me feel hurt. I know I can heal. Let me try again—again and again —Laurel Chen from Greensickness ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 08, 2025
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Mar 08, 2025
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Mar 08, 2025
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Paperback
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1324074701
| 9781324074700
| 1324074701
| 3.98
| 920
| Feb 16, 2023
| Feb 13, 2024
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really liked it
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The always inspiring Mahatma Gandhi once said ‘live as if you were to die tomorrow, learn as if you were to live forever,’ a great reminder to always
The always inspiring Mahatma Gandhi once said ‘live as if you were to die tomorrow, learn as if you were to live forever,’ a great reminder to always keep your mind active and learning. Especially in our ever changing world full of misinformation it is increasingly important to learn how to sort fact from fiction and identity when you are being manipulated. Like right now, because that quote from Gandhi—while often repeated and cited—is not actually something he said. Sorry for the confusion (I just wrote a blog on misinformation and fake quote for the library this month), but this is why Sander van der Linden’s book Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity is such an important book to learn from as he dissects the issues of misinformation (and disinformation) in our world, why it is so infectious to the public, and ideas on how we can prevent and push back against it. Especially in our modern age of social media which is where your grandfather’s conspiracy theory memes go to multiple like rabbits, having at least a basic education in information literacy (and, more specifically, media literacy) can be so important. Sander van der Linden covers topics such as “prebunking” strategies, the common types of manipulation employed to spread misinformation and more. It makes for a fascinating and rather accessible read. Combatting misinformation is important to protect truth and to ensure health, safety and freedoms are protected for society, all the more important when the industry plant talking head of the US just spewed out a relatively unenforceable executive order bypassing democratic checks and balances which innacurately and unrealistically states that instances of ‘combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States’ in an effort to curb online fact checking, these are skills we should all be thinking about while online. As a Professor of Social Psychology in Society at the University of Cambridge and the Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, Sander van der Linden has made understanding and educating about misinformation and the psychology of manipulation his livelihood. His more recent book, The Psychology of Misinformation, really gets into a more academic look at the psychology behind it but here he has offered a rather accessible overview on why it sticks and what we can do about it. With misinformation becoming a rather important topic during the pandemic in 2020, van der Linden couches the language here into looking at misinformation as a sort of ‘virus’ that infects the brain to manipulate ‘basic cognitive machinery.’ The good news, he writes, is that it can be countered with a ‘psychological vaccine” that ‘does not require any needles, just an open mind,’ and a toolkit of misinformation countering tactics. The book begins with some rather fascinating looks at how misinformation catches on and spreads. A major issue, he points out, is that ‘where factual scientific information is full of caveats, misinformation and conspiracy theories operate in certainties.’ Basically, misinformation is certain and simple whereas the truth requires a little bit of brainpower. Thats why memes are so effective–they are easy to understand, easy to share, and tend to employ manipulative tactics that make them catch on such as humor or emotional resonance whereas science tends to be…fairly low energy on the excitement scale. Misinformation catches on due to issues of filter bubbles, preconceived biases, cherry picking for points that agree with you, distrust of authority or opposing arguments, and many other cognitive issues and most disinformation employs some of these common manipulation tricks: emotional language, false dichotomy, cherry picking info, fake experts, red herrings, scapegoating, ad hominem attacks, polarization, impersonation, slippery slope fallacies, and basically any other rhetorical fallacies. As someone that likes to make learning fun, here is a QUIZ to see if you can spot the correct manipulation technique. Sander van der Linden and his team also developed an online game called Bad News where you practice writing misinformation social media posts to see what makes you gain the most traction. The game was used for research and found the game helped people recognize common disinformation tactics and were more readily able to identify it when they come across it in real life. You can play it HERE. This book is also full of a lot of interesting studies, such as a lot of looks at a 2021 Yougov survey with topics like percentage of people who think a secret group is running the world or how 75% of Trump voters ‘continue to believe that the 2020 elected was rigged’ even after their arguments for it were disproved. But why do people continue to believe things despite a lack of evidence, van der Linden asks us, and many conspiracy theories require an almost impossible level of complicity in people with no reason to stay silent (an example used is that 400,000 NASA employees would have had to be ‘complicit in the conspiracy’ if the moon landing was fake). We have aspects of confirmation bias discussed but also some wild studies on how false memories can be instilled, such as my personal favorite, The Bugs Bunny study: ‘[Researchers] exposed people to a fake Disneyland pamphlet entitled, 'It's time to remember the magic? The point was to activate childhood memories of a visit to Disney-land. However, there was something odd about the pamphlet: it featured a message from Bugs Bunny - a Warner Brothers cartoon character that couldn't possibly have been present at Disneyland. After exposure to the ad, about 25 to 35 percent of participants claimed to have met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. People offered up specific details too; about 60 per cent of those who claimed to have met Bugs remembered they hugged him, and one individual even recalled Bugs holding a carrot.’ From aspects like this, van der Linden gets into his Six Degrees of Manipulation and educates on how to spot misinformation as well as what to do about it. A big key is information literacy. The American Library Association defines information literacy as a set of abilities that require a person to ‘recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.’ This goes hand in hand with media literacy, or the ability to critically analyze stories presented in the mass media and to determine their accuracy or credibility. You can read more in depth on how to identify misinformation HERE, but the basics of vetting information are: 1. Identify Who Provided The Information 2. Acknowledge Any Potential Bias 3. Check the Purpose of the Information 4. Verify Citations and References “Prebunking” becomes a major topic at the end, which is essentially learning to stop misinformation instead of trying to disprove it. The issues in 2020 showed that effective disinformation communities are participatory and networked, while quality information distribution mechanisms tend to be less “sticky” and often dismissed as elitist or a “I’m not going to read all that” type of information. But identifying misinformation and NOT sharing it is a good way to combat it, especially when research shows that trying to debunk information reaches less people and is less convincing than stopping it in the first place. [image] Image source: World Health Organization Prebunking also requires centering the truth. Often the news will say “so and so said: [insert bonkers statement]” and then go about picking it apart in a way that regrettably seems like validating anyone who might agree with it by not just dismissing it outright. Prebunking would have you lead with the truth and then point out how a statement that disagrees with it is wrong and framing it as such instead of giving any opportunity for it to be taken seriously. There are three main types of prebunks: 1. fact-based: correcting a specific false claim or narrative 2. logic-based: explaining tactics used to manipulate 3. source-based: pointing out bad sources of information With prebunking, research has certainly shown that giving people the tools to identify misinformation is the most successful way at preventing it and, in the rather medical terminology used in this book, prevention is a more effective way to combat misinformation than any sort of "cure" for it. While Foolproof can feel academic at times, it is actually rather accessible and fun to read. It makes for an excellent look at misinformation and strategies to combat it and does so in a very engaging and productive manner. For those who tend to want to avoid politics, this book remains relatively to the subject of misinformation and doesn’t get very much into divisions by political parties in a way that would make it easy to recommend to virtually anyone (there are some political aspects, but it is far more subdued than most books on the subject). I really enjoyed this and for all the books on misinformation I’ve been reading for my committee assignment at the library, this has so far been my favorite and the one I would find most useful to the general public. 4.5/5 ...more |
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it was amazing
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The late, great Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and Pulitzer prize among dozens of other awards, and a household name in fictio
The late, great Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and Pulitzer prize among dozens of other awards, and a household name in fiction, left behind an incredibly accomplished legacy of work. Eleven novels, three plays, multiple essay collections and a handful of children’s books, yet, amidst her impressive body of work, only one short story: Recitatif. Originally published in 1983, Recitatif clocks in at around 40 pages yet manages to stand just as prominent as her novels in its exploration of racial identity and race relations in the United States. ‘The only short story I have ever written,’ Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination that Recitatif was ‘an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.’ The story follows Twyla and Roberta as they reunite years after having bonded during their shared stay at a State care facility. The two girls are different races, yet Morrison never indicates their racial identity and instead allows the reader to decide. It becomes a very self-conscious exploration where the reader is forced to confront their own racial preconceptions in order to determine which girl is which race, but more importantly why we think that. ‘Much of the mesmerizing power,’ Zadie Smith says in her incredibly incisive introduction (which surpasses the story in page length), ‘lies in that first definition of 'peculiar to': that which characterizes. As readers, we urgently want to characterize the various characteristics on display.’ This might fall into gimmickry in lesser hands, yet Morrison rises above it through her powerful examinations of identity and racial Othering, and Recitatif shows Morrison’s brilliance sharpened to spectacular succinctness. ‘Those four short months were nothing in time. Maybe it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew—how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed. There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well.’ Truth be told, I had checked this book out of the library three times prior and never got to it (I always forgot I had it until my replacement fee warning hit my laptop while logging in for work and had to return it). But apparently fourth time is a charm and I am glad I finally got to this! In an interview with Paris Review, Morrison was asked why she wouldn’t want to simply write “the black woman came out of the store” to which Morrison responded that ‘you can, but it has to be important that she is black.’ In a literature dominated by white culture, a character that is never given racial identifiers is often assumed to be white and in this way to describe a character as Black—even though it is accurate—has a sense of “Othering” them when it is not deemed necessary to describe a white character as while.So when asked if the intention was to confuse readers by alerting the reader to the two girls being different races but giving no indication which is which, Morrison responded: ‘Well, yes. But to provoke and enlighten. I did that as a lark. What was exciting was to be forced as a writer not to be lazy and rely on obvious codes. Soon as I say, Black woman . . . I can rest on or provoke predictable responses, but if I leave it out then I have to talk about her in a complicated way—as a person.’ The reader is left to sort it out and decide which aspects they think might be an indicator. Early descriptions of the two center on aspects of relation to food or education, for instance: ‘We were eight years old and got F’s all the time. Me because I couldn’t remember what I read or what the teacher said. And Roberta because she couldn’t read at all and didn’t even listen to the teacher.’ In her introduction, Zadie Smith asks us ‘Which version of educational failure is more black? Which kind of poor people eat so poorly—or are so grateful to eat bad food? Poor black folk or poor white folk? Both? As a reader you know there’s something unseemly in these kinds of inquiries, but old habits die hard. You need to know. So you try another angle.’ I enjoy this aspect of forcing the reader to confront their own biases. I am also reminded of how, in the novel Gingerbread, Helen Oyeyemi never mentions her Black characters as such (only the white ones) and it is nearly 100pgs into a story when a description of hair makes the reader suddenly aware the characters have all been Black. What do you assume and why? In Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation, white writer Elizabeth Abel discusses how she perceived Twyla as the white character due to finding a shared focus on the sort of social situations she is interested in. Most white readers, Abel discovered, tend to read Twyla as the white character whereas Black readers tend to read her as Black. Smith also discussed how ‘geography, in America, is fundamental to racial codes,’ and when we learn that adult Twyla lives in Newburgh. What geographical preconceptions of race is Morrison adorning the narrative with mentions of ‘white flight’ where ‘half the population of Newburgh is on welfare now, but to my husband’s family it was still some upstate paradise of a time long past,’ as Twyla states. Roberta, on the other hand has married a wealthy man. ‘Shoes, dress, everything lovely and summery and rich. I was dying to know what happened to her, how she got from Jimi Hendrix to Annandale, a neighborhood full of doctors and IBM executives. Easy, I thought. Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world.’ The reader must question who “they” are—is it the white people, the rich, or is Twyla one of the sort who cry reverse racism and assume any success is handed out by affirmative action or welfare. Morrison yet again leaves it to the reader. ‘We didn’t like each other all that much at first, but nobody else wanted to play with us because we weren’t real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped.’ Twyla and Roberta represent another sort of Othering that occurs beyond race and dips into discussions of class. Being there due to parents who aren’t dead but are “out dancing” too much to care for them, they are pushed beneath even the usual divisions of racial politics. It’s a sort of intersectional oppression. ‘If whiteness is an illusion, on what else can a poor man without prospects pride himself?’ In her book on coalition building, What White People Can Do Next, Emma Dabiri points out that the social and financial barriers that oppressed Black people often end up harming the poor whites as well. ‘Yet in many of these instances where this is the case—because as a white person your “race” isn’t one of the impediments to your achieving the good life—the game is still rigged…many are still set up to lose, with little comfort beyond the belief that “at least I’m not Black!”’ In Maggie, the woman with disabilities restricting her movement and leaving her unable to speak, the girls find someone they can denote as lower than them and take pleasure—and cruelty—in this. As Smith observes ‘fascism labors to create the category of the “nobody,” the scapegoat, the sufferer.’ It is interesting that the girls have a opposing memory of the violence that befell Maggie, the nobody, and argue if she had been Black or not (which triggers another possible “clue” to their identities). Twyla does some real soul searching here. ‘I didn’t kick her; I didn’t join in with the gar girls and kick that lady, but I sure did want to. We watched and never tried to help her and never called for help. Maggie was my dancing mother. Deaf, I thought, and dumb. Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night. . . . And when the gar girls pushed her down, and started roughhousing, I knew she wouldn’t scream, couldn’t—just like me and I was glad about that.’ It is a truly powerful moment of recognition that as long as their is a scapegoat, a further underclass, one would focus their attention on ensuring they remain low to continue to have a status that can still look down upon someone instead of fighting for equity for all. It is the vicious impulse that derails liberation, which must be for all or it is not liberation. Smith makes a great point in how here Morrison takes her examination on race and makes it into a deeper look at power hierarchies that exist to keep division and keep a broken down class of people. ‘Twyla begins to describe a different binary altogether. Not the familiar one that divides black and white, but the one between those who live within the system—whatever their position may be within it—and those who are cast far outside of it. The unspeakable. The outcast. The forgotten. The nobody.’ Twyla and Roberta find themselves at odds over a racially charged political issue over bussing, forcing a separation of two girls that had once found themselves equals, where ‘though we seem so unalike, how alike we all are under our skins.’ Instead of moving against one another, Morrison calls for an examination of shared history, much like the shared history of the nation, of the world, and using it as a way to find unity instead of othering for the purpose of power. ‘Strife. Racial strife. The word made me think of a bird—a big shrieking bird out of 1,000,000,000 BC. Flapping its wings and cawing. Its eye with no lid always bearing down on you. All day it screeched and at night it slept on the rooftops.’ A powerhouse of a story in a small package, Toni Morrison’s Recitatif is so succinctly packed with complexities of insight and self-investigation that it is hard to discuss it without surpassing the length of the story itself. A cleverly constructed story that forces self reflection in the reader and a incisive exploration of racial identity and power structures, Morrison once again proves why she is a giant of literature. 4.5/5 ...more |
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| 3.79
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| 1964
| Oct 1969
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really liked it
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Before she became a novelist known for dark visions of the future and gritty, incisive social criticisms on power and patriarchy, Margaret Atwood got
Before she became a novelist known for dark visions of the future and gritty, incisive social criticisms on power and patriarchy, Margaret Atwood got her foot into the literary door as a poet. With her 1964 release of the The Circle Game, the Canadian writer’s second collection of poetry, Atwood won the the prestigious Governor’s General Award and the world began to get its early glimpse into the works of a writer who would become something of a household name in North America. A brief but brutally incisive collection, The Circle Game challenges social norms while juxtaposing ideas of perception and reality to examine the power structures and struggles inherent within. Calling for a resistance against the cyclical structures of society that trap and restrain us, championing freedom despite the cost to comfort and pushing to remove the social frames that squash nuance because ‘identity,’ she writes, is ‘something too huge and simple / for us to see,’ Atwood’s The Circle Game is a complex and rewarding little collection. This Is a Photograph of Me It was taken some time ago. At first it seems to be a smeared print: blurred lines and grey flecks blended with the paper; then, as you scan it, you see in the left-hand corner a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree (balsam or spruce) emerging and, to the right, halfway up what ought to be a gentle slope, a small frame house. In the background there is a lake, and beyond that, some low hills. (The photograph was taken the day after I drowned. I am in the lake, in the centre of the picture, just under the surface. It is difficult to say where precisely, or to say how large or small I am: the effect of water on light is a distortion but if you look long enough, eventually you will be able to see me.)” I enjoy seeing how many of Atwood’s signature themes are already at work here in her early poetry. Explorations of the oppressive structures of patriarchy and social constraints come across through rather vivid imagery and whimsical metaphors that hint at a darkness beneath. Such as in An Attempted Solution for Chess Problems with the image of the chess pieces, a seemingly innocent object is imbued with dread: ‘The shadows of the chessmen To imply a digging beneath the surface, Atwood employs asides through the use of lines contained in parenthesis that create the effect of a second layer, almost as multiple voices working in commentary on the poem. It also emphasizes the sense of duality at work within many of these poems and how much of life, she would argue, is a distraction from the truth of the matter hiding within. There is no centre; the centres travel with us unseen like our shadows on a day when there is no sun. While an impressive collection as a whole, the real heart of it is the titular poem (read it HERE) where all the themes collide. A rather brilliant narrative poem that solidifies Atwood’s motif of cyclical motion and the dark undercurrents of society that lurk beneath the innocuous veneer of commonplace activities, such as the children’s game of Ring Around the Rosie (a seemingly innocent rhyme that is a reference to the to plague and a reminder of inevitable death) featured in the poem. The stanzas cycle between the children and adults before the two collide in the final stanza to emphasize them as ‘mirrors’ of one another to show the cycle of conformity and highlight the death of innocence. The children are concentrating and we ‘might mistake this / tranced movement for joy,’ and while they are moving in communal harmony each is ‘singing, but not to each other’ and begin to ignore the natural world around them to be ‘fixed on the empty moving spaces just in front of them.’ Not unlike the adult world of monotony as a cog in a capitalist machine instead of amidst nature, and the second stanza juxtaposes the children with the world of adults that is mostly ‘arguing, opening and closing drawers.’ We see the children move from innocence, into a museum that was once a fort and fixate on the guns, children tracing moats in the sand moves into the adulthood where ‘you trace me / like a country’s boundary,’ combining the romantic with a national identity emphasized by separation and barriers. The poem strikes deep and by the end the “you” of childhood is the “you” of adulthood leading the children ‘ according to / the closed rules of your games, / but there is no joy in it.’ It is unconscious, it is merely following in a cycle. Atwood shows that ‘that the whole point It is a ‘cage of bones’, we are all caught in a trap, a self-perpetuating cycle from the cradle to the grave of conformity and abandoning the wild self and Atwood concludes that ‘I want to break the cycle.’ Such rather rebelliousness and social criticism would continue to be central to her many novels that followed and become one of the largest themes associated with her work. ‘I know it is easier for me to lose my way forever here, than in other landscapes.’ —from Journey to the Interior The self as a landscape is a central image to this collection as well. As Sherrill E. Grace discusses in the introduction ‘to see the self as other, as landscape, is a possible way out of the circle’ and this theme builds in intensity as the collection progresses, much like the Circle Game would build in spiraling intensity. She urges us to break free, to not remain stuck in it. The poem Against Still Life is another that hits this theme on the head, being against the idea of stationary, being told what you see, or being told how to live your life and instead grasping life to ‘change it to / whatever I desire / it to be’ where what was once a still life of an orange is now ‘an egg / a sun / an orange moon / perhaps a skull’ because creativity and the freedom to create changes all that. Love is an awkward word Not what I mean and Too much like magazine stories In stilted dentists’ Waiting rooms. How can anyone use it? I’d rather say I like your Lean spine Or your eyebrows Or your shoes But just by standing there and Being awkward You force me to speak Love. —from Letters, Towards and Away A brief but rather powerful collection that is sometimes more like solving a puzzle than letting poetic ideas wash over you, The Circle Game is an early landmark in Margaret Atwoods career. Often dark, but with flashes of tenderness such as when an insect mops up the crumbs following meal with a lover—’how it gorges on a few / unintentional / spilled crumbs of love’—Atwood always dazzles with imagery and raises her voice in brilliant defiance. A fun little book. 3.5/5 ...more |
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really liked it
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Gazing out at the snow cascading down to blanket the town, I’m struck by how something so bright and beautiful holds a darkness inside, a danger for t
Gazing out at the snow cascading down to blanket the town, I’m struck by how something so bright and beautiful holds a darkness inside, a danger for those caught in its path where one small slip up can be devastating. Society is depicted much the same in the works of Edith Wharton, where the glitz and glamour of high society holds a darkness that dismisses those of whom they disapprove and barrs the way for anyone caught outside its circle. New Year’s Day, a brief novella from Wharton originally published in 1890, takes critical aim at a 19th century New York society eager to sensationalize scandal and inflict judgement upon those involved. Yet appearances can be deceiving and Wharton expertly details the affair of Lizzie Hazeldean—caught with her lover in The Fifth Avenue Hotel when a fire caused occupants to flee—from a remove built on assumptions and half evidence before flipping the script with a hidden truth. Examining the expectations and lack of opportunities afforded women in 19th century society, New Years Day is a gorgeously crafted story of reputation rocked by scandal, the complexities of sacrifice and the gap between public perception and personal motivations. ‘She had done one great—or abominable—thing; rank it as you please, it had been done heroically.’ Fraught with misjudgements, much of New Year’s Day is narrated by ‘an overgrown boy’ intrigued by Lizzie after having heard her dismissed and looked down upon in his youth over an affair made public. Shunned by society as her husband’s illness was dropping him towards death, Wharton shows how moral judgements can evict a person from society at a whim. Yet, as we learn from Lizzie, the affair may have been less of a sensual scandal and more a necessity for survival. ‘You thought I was a lovelorn mistress,’ she chides, revealing her actions may have been in pursuit of love for her husband but her options were limited due to the lack of financial mobility afforded to women who were denied an existence beyond being an accessory to men. ‘Among the young women now growing up about me I find none with enough imagination to picture the helpless incapacity of the pretty girl of the ’seventies, the girl without money or vocation, seemingly put into the world only to please, and unlearned in any way of maintaining herself there by her own efforts’ This revelation, late in the plot, highlights Wharton’s skill for misdirection that forces the reader to re-examine their own assumptions and judgements and consider how, like the harsh gatekeepers of society, that snap judgements may be flawed and founded in half-truths. That the narrator is a man, and a rather naive one at that, furthers the commentary into criticisms of patriarchy and the unequal moral judgements on sexuality that are harsher and more restrictive of women. While Lizzie is doomed into a ‘cold celibacy’ of adulthood, Wharton asks us to consider how her actions, which many might judge her for, are an incisive criticism of the ways a woman is shamed for being manipulative despite having few other avenues to assert herself. Is she a cold, calculating gold digger as a moral defect or merely a product of a society that backed her into a corner? While Lizzie is misrepresented as unlearned and dull by her depiction as being uninterested in the books her husband keeps around the house, we see she is quite adept at the ability to ‘read hearts.’ She can use the lusts of predatory men to her advantage, yet only she faces the harsh judgement for exercising her sexuality. A quick read with an exacting purpose of social critiques, New Year’s Day succinctly showcases Wharton’s signature skills. An excellent little tale on reputation, social retribution, yet, at the heart of it, a tale about the complications of love under duress. 4/5 ...more |
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| 3.76
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liked it
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While awash in Golden Age nostalgia, Jason Guriel’s On Browsing did remind me how much I do find comfort in simply browsing shelves. Bookstores in par
While awash in Golden Age nostalgia, Jason Guriel’s On Browsing did remind me how much I do find comfort in simply browsing shelves. Bookstores in particular give me a sense of calm and joy. Sure, I spend all day working both a library and bookstore, but there is something peacefully pleasant in seeing the variations in collections, seeing what books get highlighted, being lost in a sea of words where nobody is going to ask me any questions. And I don’t even have to want to buy anything (though, lets be honest, I likely will). I had a moment recently where I was in a state of grief and the next thing I knew I had driven myself to the Barnes and Noble I used to work for and centered myself in the stacks (I ended up with a copy of Philippe Besson's Lie With Me which I hope to start soon). But what Guriel’s brief treatise on browsing points out is that ‘apparently, there are droves of us who miss the tactile pleasure of combing through physical matter, of hefting books, of standing at a bin and clacking CDs like dominoes.’ A quick read, and while it does occasionally veer towards an over-sentimental romanticization of a physical media age that feels like your uncle ranting about “kids these days,” it still does so in an earnest and heartfelt attempt to consider how the transition from what he calls the "Age of Browsing" to the "Age of Scrolling" has cultural implications and alters our engagement with media. For better or for worse. With a poetic wit and full of social insights, On Browsing was an interesting and engaging trip through media nostalgia. ‘How often serendipity saw to our needs back when we wandered the world without a data plan.’ This was an interesting book to consider and write about as I sit here in the hours before the new year comes creeping in. Change is something that certainly weighs on the mind on a day like this and as someone that often struggles with change, I also have a real appreciation for resilience in the face of change. Not that Guriel adopts a doomsday tone, however, as he chronicles the shrinking access of not only physical media but also physical spaces one can be without having to pay. Like Taylor Swift sings in >Coney Island—‘we were like the mall before the internet / It was the one place to be,’—the mall was a place one could simply exist, especially teens, and as malls close down and retail spaces discourage loitering, this sort of lounging around browsing with friends is vanishing too. I recall people warning of the loss of physical media and in recent years we’ve seen finished tv series or movies deleted with no way to access them and Guriel mourns this loss where the internet isn’t always forever. ‘Many albums and movies can’t be streamed and lie stranded in physical formats, in the tar pit of the past. Hyperlinks to pieces I wrote only a few years ago have already rotted like rope bridges.’ But the biggest focus here is the alterations in the way we find and consume media and what that says about society. He starts by looking at how, in Victorian England, browsing was a way for women to go out, saying they were shopping, and roam the city unchaperoned as a liberating experience. And now instead of browsing windows, we scroll phones, something he argues became even more entrenched as a societal norm due to the COVID-19 pandemic when going out wasn’t available. When he has lines like ‘We scroll to avoid being alone with ourselves, but we scroll, finally, because our devices have trained us to,’ I wish there was some time spent acknowledging that internet browsing and shipping can be more than just a choice to prefer phones than going out and lack of access to stores or mobility issues, for starters, are reasons that have made this a necessity as well. Though he isn’t wrong when he notes that smartphones ‘were browsing us’ and building data sets for profit. Though, ironically considering the nostalgia of this book, nostalgia is a very profitable marketing tool. ‘To browse is to act and be acted on: to exercise one’s taste while submitting to the authority of others.’ Guriel looks at stores such as the record shops of old as a place where one could travel and return with some new gem they had not heard of before. ‘Unlike algorithms,’ he writes, ‘carbon-based clerks didn’t necessarily care about your preferences, because they knew what was good for you.’ Of course he adds some well placed references here to the film High Fidelity (based on the novel of the same name by Nick Hornby), but it makes a good point on how, without someone like the cool record store clerk you look up to pointing you towards new music, it can be difficult to wade through the limitless ocean of music online. ‘Choice can be oppressive, and the lack of it, liberating,’ he posits. There have been numerous articles about this in recent years arguing ‘the record store staff become tastemakers who can guide buyers through the maze of obscure releases in ways no algorithms can,’ and what seems to be a throughline is that the interaction with the clerk, the journey to the store, the risk of purchasing unheard, handling the physical album from reading the liner notes to putting it in your player all amalgamated to an “experience” that cannot be replicated by pushing play on a phone. Many have argued against this, that music is still music and the external experience is simply subjective nostalgia to have something to bemoan, but Guriel points to what he calls ‘wind resistance’ that made the cultivation of knowledge and taste more rewarding. ‘It took effort to cultivate our enthusiasms in a desert, but it’s clear now that we took the desert’s role for granted. Knowledge tends to stick when you’ve toiled for it.’ He also discusses how, without physical media, there is less a sense of ownership, less an external identity from possession of it, and that its so easy on phones to only listen to the one song you want on an album and ignore the rest whereas ownership made you listen all the way multiple times. ‘Knowledge tends to stick when you’ve toiled for it,’ he argues. ’the Age of Browsing encouraged second chances. Owning physical media forced you to reckon with it, to rewatch it, to appreciate it. (Maybe you sometimes tried too hard to appreciate something, but there are worse sins.) We steeped ourselves in stuff, and the stuff would start to sink in. Art has always required second—and third and fourth—chances to saturate the mind.’ There are albums I certainly grew to love where the first few listens were just okay but after a week or two it sank in and Guriel wonders if that still exists with digital media. He also turns to the book industry and how owning a physical copy, having it on your shelf, is another mark of pride and collection curation. Sure, this can be used as a replacement for identity and some people just don’t care to own stuff (theres whole movements against letting your things own you, for instance), but it is an interesting idea to consider. As someone who loves to have my own books, I get it. On the idea of returning to the same media again, he points to a statement by poet Seamus Heaney that to have a single poem committed to memory and returned to, it makes life better and is a ‘devotion’ to art. To this he adds: ‘To dwell on a single poem, to the exclusion of others, isn’t just okay; it’s a function of devotion. To cling to a work of art—to revisit it, to steep yourself in it—is to approach the state of prayer. It’s to open your mind to the possibility of being tinted. Of being transformed. Streaming platforms, on the other hand, flood the mind. They set it afloat and bear it away—on to the next novelty. They promise abundance but deliver a deluge.’ Still, sometimes this book begins to feel very much golden age nostalgia that only looks to what is perceived as the negatives of change and romanticizes the past. Society is different, many don’t have the time to go browse or the access to it, but he does admit ‘perhaps I’m merely mourning the loss of a paradigm because it happened to be the one I grew up in,’ so its not not self aware at least. Furthermore, I did enjoy how many of his book and music references align with my own from the time I was a high school browser. On Browsing was a fun little read with lots of little thoughts to think as we push forward into a digital age and look back on a past when physical media ruled the day. 3.5/5 ...more |
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1250286220
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really liked it
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The rise of social media, AI, and other tech have us all living through social changes and paradigm shifts, many of which we won’t even recognize unti
The rise of social media, AI, and other tech have us all living through social changes and paradigm shifts, many of which we won’t even recognize until it is analyzed in hindsight. Having formerly worked in the beauty industry until she could no longer rationalize her moral beliefs with the work she was asked to do, Ellen Atlanta now speaks out about the negative social influences on young girls and women due to the industry. Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Affects Women is an erudite examination of how social media perpetuates harm and oppressive beauty standards and is an important read for anyone, not just young women. ‘Beauty is capital,’ Tavi Gevinson once wrote, ‘and grows in value based only on the exclusion of others,’ and through Atlanta’s investigations in Pixel Flesh we see how this sort of exclusionary capital is piling harm upon all those it touches. Through a blend of personal narrative, industry research, and alarming anecdotes on social media influencers and the corporations who love them, Atlanta takes a sharp look at how even as we recognize and criticize toxic beauty standards and industries who push them for profit, society still often falls in line and upholds them. It is an alarming book and although Atlanta admits these cycles of oppression are difficult to break, Pixel Flesh is ultimately as empowering as it is interesting. ‘The more beautiful you are, the more beautiful you must become, the more the standard intensifies.’ Having grown up during the boom of social media, Ellen Atlanta recalls firsthand how quickly the internet culture shifted. For people such as those of Gen Z, she examines how they were raised ‘in a social experiment on stacks of images and endless scrolls of self-comparison,’ citing a study that shows in the 2010s ‘rates of depression, anxiety, and self-injury in adolescent girls surged in line with the rise in social media.’ She describes a sort of ‘self gaslighting’ as posting on social media became ‘a space for slicing, for offering the best bits for the feed’ in a way that almost became competitive. ‘Their pursuit of beauty means lifting, shaping, dieting, dyeing, injecting, slicing, scarring, painting, curling, padding, cutting, starving, concealing and revealing. When women are already socially conditioned to compete with one another, narrowing the ideal only makes the competition more fierce. In one study, 80 percent of women interviewed said that they competed with other women over physical appearance.’ This harm to self-image is what began to really bother Atlanta. Her ‘villain origin story,’ as she likes to put it, began when she was working as a consultant in the beauty industry for ‘a company extolling empowerment and self-love whilst profiting from the ever-higher expectations of women’s bodies,’ a company that, as she explains in an interview for 10Magazine, ‘essentially allowed you to buy new facial features – new lips, a new forehead, a new nose.’ The moral issues piled up, especially noting that the past decade has seen a 70% increase in demand for cosmetic procedures. ‘I couldn’t reconcile promoting those treatments to young women with my feminism, I was fighting in my head with how I could be a part of the industry in a positive way – how I could wrestle my beliefs with my complicity and my future in the industry. Ultimately, I decided to quit my job.’ Her insight into the industry, however, gives a lot of weight and context to this book that I found as interesting as it was important. Working with Kylie Jenner, for instance, or seeing the studies around body-image associated with social media and corporations knowingly capitalizing on that, what she terms the ‘commercialization of insecurity.’ The way beauty is portrayed in the media, she argues, does a lot to set a social standard that has historically either erased or fetishized marginalized bodies and beauty products have begun to target younger and younger audiences. Particularly through tiktok. With AI, social media influencers are able to further edit their image to the extent that, as Atlanta describes, they often don’t recognize each other when meeting in person. There is a cost to this beauty, Atlanta describes, and it puts women at a disadvantage both in terms of time and finances. As is noted by Renee Engeln in her work Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women, ‘We don’t consider the gender gap in time and money spent on beauty...but time and money matter. They’re essential sources of power and influence and also major sources of freedom.’ While men also can face issues over body image and meeting standards of socially coached “attractiveness,” it is far more prevalent and costly for women. What Atlanta calls a ‘beauty tax.’ This can often have intersections with race and further affect marginalized women or women presenting individuals. Hair for instance ‘Our idea of femininity is intricately braided into our perception of hair,’ she writes, noting how hair is also a large cultural aspect of Black identities or that, because beauty tends to be centered on Western ideologies, this can further marginalize others. ‘From birth we are conditioned to understand that to be beautiful is to be loved, to be special, to be good.’ Not only can beauty standards be harmful to self-confidence but as philosopher Kate Manne describes in her Unshrinking, beauty standards are weaponized to degrade women. It is policing of women’s bodies in a way that upholds patriarchy and one one hand sexualizes women in order to objectify them while on the other shames them for being sexual. In her book My Body, Emily Ratajkowski describes firsthand how the power offered by beauty inevitably is a false power that allows me to retain cultural control: ‘In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place. Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over.’ In the chapter The Witches of Cycberspace, Atlanta looks at the way this can turn frightening very fast, with men demanding women uphold beauty standards to the point of harassment or threats of violence, while also dehumanizing women for being sexual and wishing violence on them as well. It is an issue only getting worse, especially for young girls. ‘According to the 2023 Girlguiding report, 81% of girls and young women aged eleven to twenty-one have experienced some form of threatening or upsetting behavior online, compared to 65% in 2018.’ But there are plenty other aspects that beauty standards are harmful to as well, such as the anti-aging skincare that only further makes aging held against women. Something I appreciated about this book were the ways it moved through a variety of social angles to try and paint a larger, overall portrait. 'Beauty is not good capital. It compounds the oppression of gender. It constrains those who identify as women against their will. It costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable.' — Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays: I’d like to give a big thank you to Sarah and her review (read it HERE) for prompting me to read this one and it was a perfect book to read for one of my library committees dealing with AI and online issues. Pixel Flesh does a good job of looking at the effects of social media-influenced beauty standards and giving a stern warning at the issues arising. While it also acknowledges these are difficult to change, it is encouraging to see so many people speaking up about them. A bleak, but fascinating read. 4.5/5 ‘You do not owe anyone perfect, and you don’t owe anyone pretty. Remove the glossy filter that smooths out any negativity, resist the feminine urge to lighten the mood, or to make others comfortable [and] practice radical honesty with yourself and others.’ ...more |
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it was amazing
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There are few greater honors in the global literary community than being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and I am thrilled to learn that South K
There are few greater honors in the global literary community than being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and I am thrilled to learn that South Korean author Han Kang has now had her name immortalized in this list of honorees. Chaesikjuuija—The Vegetarian in English—is Kang’s best known work, winning the Booker International Prize in 2016 along with translator Deborah Smith, and is a searing portrait of obdurate patriarchal societies that strangle out women's autonomy in order to more strongly shackle them to a life of passivity and familial obedience. The Vegetarian is a tapestry of four interwoven lives in three voices emphasizing the lack of agency afforded to the life most central to the narrative: Yeong-hye, the wife of Mr. Cheong who’s ‘life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance,’ at the hands of those around her. At least until she decides to stop eating meat. Told in a darkly poetic prose strong enough to hold a host of horrors, Kang cuts through the masks of society until ‘familiarity bleeds into strangeness, certainty becomes impossible’ in order for her to take critical aim at forces of violence and control. Sharp, sinister and surreal, The Vegetarian is a powerful tale of the aggressions aimed at those who step outside the social norms and the misogynistic assumptions that impose subservience and suppression and it makes for a truly unforgettable read. ‘It’s your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you’re free to do just as you like. And even that doesn’t turn out how you wanted.’ Originally published in South Korea as three novellas, The Vegetarians three sections, each from the voice of a different character, stitches the perspectives of family in orbit around the story of Yeong-hye. We begin with her husband, Mr. Cheong, who enjoyed her being ‘completely unremarkable in every way,’ and because ‘it was rare for her to demand anything of me’ making her suited to be the quiet, submissive wife he desires. Her choosing to refrain from eating meat is an annoyance to him, but his real frustration is her desire to attain bodily autonomy as he believes ‘it was nothing but sheer obstinacy for a wife to go against her husband's wishes.’ We move to her brother-in-law as he uses his art to seduce her but, like Mr. Cheong, becomes angry when her actions are less in submission to his sexual hunger but instead enacted as a way to perform her body in a way she desires. Finally we have her sister who is haunted by Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat but beings to understand it as an act of resistance. Kang orchestrates these characters in a sort of destructive dance where we find them rather inscrutable to one another. Or often to themselves.There is a certain sorrow to discover those closest elude decoding or have interior lives we cannot decode, such as In-hye’s revelations after divorcing her husband: ‘Had she ever really understood her husband’s true nature, bound up as it was with that seemingly impenetrable silence? She’d thought, at one time, that it might be revealed in his work…Despite her best efforts, though, his works proved incomprehensible to her. Nothing was revealed.’ The incomprehensibility becomes a clever theme on how our best efforts to understand each other often amounts to placing the personality of others into a box of faulty assumptions and then becoming upset when they act off script of our presumptions. It shines a spotlight on the assumption of control one might impose upon others, a control that becomes harshly oppressive when it is enabled by misogynistic gender roles and feels threatened by any resistance to it. Which is what Kang executes so brilliantly here by denying Yeong-hye a voice similarly to how it has been suppressed by those around her and she must have her own thoughts decentered from her own story to instead have it told through the flawed assumptions of others who can’t truly comprehend her, or, such as the men narrating the first two sections, could never begin to understand what it is like to live as a woman denied any sense of self-agency. ‘She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.’ Yeong-hye, ‘a woman of few words,’ represents the push and pull between the desire for an authentic, autonomous self and the socially imposed role of a subordinate, familial self. Haunted by horrific dreams of meat and violence, she decides to be a vegetarian as a refusal to be a part of the violence all around. In this way she views plant life as a sort of innocence and her draw to the brother-in-law is only mistaken as sexual when in actuality she enjoys the flowers he paints on her naked body as symbolic of becoming innocence or, better yet, being able to choose to be painted as a symbol. But her actions are met with the consequences of societal disdain, reflected in her husband's anger and the family attempting to force her to eat meat. ‘The very idea that there should be this other side to her, one where she selfishly did as she pleased, was astonishing. Who would have thought she could be so unreasonable.’ The idea that she could have a sense of agency is outright offensive to those around her. ‘Look at yourself, now! Stop eating meat, and the world will devour you whole.’ Even in her attempts to not eat entirely, she is held into a hospital bed with a feeding tube shoved into her nose. The message is clear: you cannot have autonomy. The novel steers us through episodes of social enforcement of norms, with Kang emphasizing the violence society tolerates in order to uphold its narrow values. ‘ In-hye stares fiercely at the trees. As if waiting for an answer. As if protesting against something.’ Kang’s The Vegetarian is situated in a South Korean society that has grappled with issues glaring issues of oppression against women, one that has only continued to be exacerbated in the years since the novel was first published in 2007. Kang takes aim at issues of misogyny in South Korea such as violence against women with South Korean being amongst the top 3 highest rates of women as homicide victims in the world despite a generally low homicide rate, gender inequality problems such as having the worst gender pay gap amongst OECD countries, and until 2013 marital rape was not a criminal act (such as is seen in the novel). While Yeong-hye’s actions are seen as outrageous to others, Kang depicts her and her role in life in such a way that one can certainly see that her refusal to submit ‘as if boundaries and limitations didn’t mean anything for her’ may be the only reasonable actions in the story. ‘ She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.’ While the novel may have raised controversy with its subject matter, Deborah Smith’s translation into English raised more controversy. Soon after winning the Booker International, Smith’s English translation began to receive harsh criticism in Korean literary communities and presses, stirring a bit of controversy with opinions on either side with one critic stating the book was ‘so different that it was more reasonable to speak of Smith’s work as an adaptation, not a translation. ’ Smith has defended her artistic choices and while she admits ‘there's plenty to criticize in my translation,’ she stands by it and says her aim was to capture the spirit over one-to-one translation. ‘Translators feel a great responsibility to the original text,’ she explained in the press, ‘I would only permit myself an infidelity for the sake of a greater fidelity.’ Readers can decide for themselves and, personally, I’m a huge fan of translated works because it allows for a greater global community around literature that I—and many others—couldn’t read otherwise. In an essay for LA Review of Books, Deborah Smith voiced concerns that the criticisms of her work and Kang’s original seemed to be a method of distracting from its message: ‘It’s not difficult to see why a book that exposes this pervasive structural violence might have been received differently by the (mostly older male) literary establishment than by the many Korean women who didn’t consider it “extreme and bizarre” at all. Perhaps the overwhelming focus on The Vegetarian’s aesthetics is a way of avoiding talking about its politics?’ Personally, I quite enjoyed the read though I have no way to know accuracy, and Han Kang has defended Smith’s choices and has continued to have her works translated by Smith. ‘What makes me worry,’ Smith expresses, ‘is when the desire to prove a particular argument about a translation encourages a misleading view of the original — in this case, overlooking the poetry I and many others see in Han's writing.’ There is indeed a beautiful poetry here, even in all the darkness and violence of the text. ‘Translating from Korean into English involves moving from a language more accommodating of ambiguity, repetition, and plain prose, to one that favors precision, concision, and lyricism,’ she continues, ‘this is simultaneously a gross generalization and an observable phenomenon.’ I will remain grateful for translators everywhere who are able to bring us such excellent stories from around the globe. Stories that have left such an impact their author now can be celebrated as a Nobel Prize recipient. This powerful, unsettling, often Kafkaesque, and societally damning tale makes for an excellent read and shocking reminder of the oppressions women face the world over. Han Kang takes aim at patriarchy and subjugation of women and offers a loud voice in protest to make room for self-agency and bodily autonomy. The Vegetarian is fascinating and fierce and a gift to us all from this Nobel Prize winning author. 4.5/5 ‘Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves—living, in other words. and sometimes they even laugh out loud. and they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they'd briefly managed to forget.’ ...more |
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it was amazing
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‘If I can’t be the freed, let me be the corrosion’ While art can be a great comfort, a great rallying cry, a great way to give voice to the otherwise v ‘If I can’t be the freed, let me be the corrosion’ While art can be a great comfort, a great rallying cry, a great way to give voice to the otherwise voiceless, art has its limitations. ‘There is no poem greater than feeding someone,’ Danez Smith decries the limitations of the form, ‘no poem to admonish the state / no poem with a key to the local / no poem to free you.’ Returning with his third collection, Bluff, the poet who once wrote ‘my poems are fed up & getting violent,’ returns with works that check the fault lines of art, staggering but strong in the wake of the first half of a new decade that arrived with an outpouring of grief, violence, protest and frustrations. Living in Minneapolis, Danez Smith chronicles the reactions to the murder of George Floyd amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, placing us into a reality where ‘my neighbors are dying. / my neighbors are killing’ and the alarm that ‘we became our own cops.’ With a sharp aim at social ills, the society that enables them, and a reckoning with one’s own inevitable complicity in our own greater oppressions, Danez Smith’s Bluff shows the now-seasoned poet at the top of their game in gorgeous verse that bears a powerful bite. ars poetica fuck all that other shit even when the fog cleared the wrong sky on my mind the horizon at the end of pity is a useless sun, hotheaded & bitter-born light, let the daughter rise when my earth meets the clouds what her say? what next she believe in & nurse? my big bad for how long i spent making apologies for what i ain't do, caught myself sorry for bodies the nation caught in its borderless maw, caught myself washing blood off someone else's hands. i'm off that, that being the mode that made a cage of guilt out my depression that being what fault i fell into & dressed into a lovely but ineffective grave. what i'm sorry for: making poetry into a house of rebuttals, a temple for the false gods of stagnant argument & dead-end feels. here, in these lines, in these rooms i add my blues & my gospels to the record of now, i offer my scratched golds to the blueprint of possible. dear reader whenever you are reading this is the future to me, which means tomorrow is still coming, which means today still lives, which means there is still time for beautiful, urgent change which means there is still time to make more alive which means there is still poetry In every way, Bluff reveals itself to be a collection that desires ‘justice the verb not justice the dream.’ The dilemma, as we find all throughout the poetry, is that the idea of a perfect world is complex, out of reach, set up to fail simply by the contradictory needs of people even in the best of circumstances. They ask ‘what is my eden? is it mine? is our eden the same as mine?’ and what spaces are there in the already limited space for queer people or Black people in a society that tries to erase them through violence. Literal violence as well as social, emotional and economic violence. ‘I don’t want a country’ they proclaim throughout the book, ‘look at what countries have done / the borders perform a killing floor.’ Smith looks at a country that can kill for profit, that wears its disdain for those who are different on its sleeve, and is tired and sick of it. i don't want America no more. i want to be a citizen of something new. i want a country for the immigrant hero. I want a country where joy is indigenous as the people. i want a country that keeps its word. i want to not be scared to drink the water. i want a country that don't bomb other countries. i want a country that don't treat its people like a virus. i want a country not trying to cure itself of me. i want a country that treats my mama right. i want a land where my sister can be free. i want a country that don't look at me & my man & think about where & how we should burn. i want a nation under a kinder god. i want justice the verb not justice the dream. i want what was promised to me. i want forty acres & a vote that matters. i want no prisons & a mule. i want all lives to matter. i want to be over with race but race ain't over me. i want peace. i want equity. i want guns to be melted into a mosque, a church someplace for us to pray toward better gods & i wanna stop praying for my country to be mine, for it to put the gun down take the bomb back. —from principles Smith addresses the social ills, centering on the violence and grief that rocks the nation on a daily basis. Of particular note is the rampant gun violence, the guns sold for the purpose of profit that leave small children dead on classroom floors. ‘“If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!” shouts the child.’ They write about the protests in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd and the ways people tried to dismiss the horrors of violence by equating property destruction as somehow a valid complaint in juxtaposition: ”Wont someone please think of the Arby’s?” seems like a very weird place to put your concern. What America are you mourning? Target wasn’t in the fields, cotton-bloodied hands. Walmart never hung from a tree. But Smith also recognizes we are somehow all complicit in the ills of the world. Even when we protest ‘tired of yelling at the machine / shaking our angry, nonviolent fists at the nuts & cogs / & the next day, resuming our roles as oil and sparks / taking place inside the machine’ How can we fight a machine we exist within, they ask. ‘if the cops kill me don’t grab your pen before you find your matches.’ Smith turns this criticism at poetry and the publishing industry, interrogating their own complicity in ‘the joy industrial complex’ as they write in the poem less hope: they clapped at my eulogies. they said encore, encore. we wanted to stop being killed & they thanked me for beauty &, pitifully, i loved them. i thanked them. i took the awards & cashed the checks. i did the one about the boy when requested, traded their names for followers. in lieu of action, i wrote a book They express guilt for having supported empire when ‘my captor / Wore my face,’ as he writes in Last Black American Poem about former President Obama. ‘Admit it, Danez, you loved / your master in your shade’ they write, ‘as bombs dropped / in the middle of childhoods.’ There is a strong reckoning in these poems about poetry as an art that cannot truly solve the problems and becomes a way to make money from a capitalist system that creates many of the problems poetry critiques. What is one to do, Smith asks us. ‘so why are we in the cage? because we need to survive. why do we need to be in the cage? because they will make use of us if they don’t find us beautiful.’ —from Two Deer in a Southside Cemetery Though not all is sadness and bleakness here, as Smith presents a hope that we can come together and rise above. In one poem, when asked ‘what was the world like?’ Smith responds ‘hurt.’ But when asked ‘how did you survive’ the answer is ‘with others.’ Together we can always try, and that is what is important. And perhaps there is no utopia, but Smith still gives us a vision of a better world, one where ‘somewhere my children can write poems about being. / without protest, their songs full of stars.’ It is a lovely dream to strive for. ‘It would be easier if God was dead & we knew it. Then we could get on with it: the final choice of the human: repair or epilogue.’ This third collection, Bluff, shows Danez Smith as a valuable poet with an extreme talent and one that is not afraid to look critically at oneself as well. A strong reckoning with the violence of a world riddled with grief, climate change, and sorry, but also a strong voice of wisdom asking the right questions, Bluff is an incredible collection of poetry that stands tall. 5/5 ‘Summertime at the end of the world, and it’s so beautiful. Trees and rivers and flowers I know by scent and not name. So pretty I could cry. I’ll miss it if we kill it. I guess I’ll miss it.’ —from My Beautiful End of the World ...more |
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it was amazing
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I often think of the best short stories as being perfectly fine tuned machines. Like in old cartoons where the watchmaker opens the back of some golde
I often think of the best short stories as being perfectly fine tuned machines. Like in old cartoons where the watchmaker opens the back of some golden timepiece that counts the heartbeats of life with impeccable precision to reveal the intricate innards of gears that must be adjusted to nearly impossible standards, the best classic stories make every word count, every word ricochet off each other towards an amalgamated effect of themes and ideas that make the small collections of words resonate far beyond the sum of their parts. And, like a cartoon watch, accurately assess the heartbeats of life. Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party is such a story. Based on her own extravagant childhood home in Wellington, New Zealand, The Garden Party juxtaposes the frivolities and festivities of wealthy society with the harsh realism of death and destitution as symbolized in the poorer families living just outside the Sheridan’s garden gates. With a bold examination of class consciousness and a sharp critique of upper class snobbishness where their extravagant gates secure them from needing to feel empathy as much as securing their property, The Garden Party is an extraordinary piece that brilliantly balances the darkness and light of life into its tiny package of prose. Having recently finished Ali Smith’s Spring in which Katherine Mansfield figures prominently, with Smith having also provided an introduction to her collected stories, I was eager to give Mansfield a read. I’d long been fascinated by her tumultuous friendship and rivalry with Virginia Woolf and while Woolf may have said Mansfield ‘stinks like a civet cat that had taken to street walking,’ she also admitted ‘I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ As we plunge into the warm, idyllic days of summer, what better story to try than one which begins ‘And after all the weather was ideal.’ This is a powerhouse of a short story that lulls you into its depiction of warm, slow joy amidst the happy anticipation of a garden party before it abruptly bashes you into a wall of death and the cold insensitivity of the wealthy for the lower classes. The story places us alongside Laura as she navigates the day, from her empathy and idolization of the working class aiding in the set-up of the party to her confronting her own family about the crassness of holding a party so near a grieving family and later visiting the house containing the dead man to offer sweets and condolences. The latter section reminded me a bit of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel Little Women with the sisters sharing their Christmas meal with the impoverished family down the road, which is likely an inspiration for Mansfield as the other Sheridan siblings, Jose, Meg and Laurie, share names with Alcott’s characters. ‘If you're going to stop a band playing every time some one has an accident, you'll lead a very strenuous life.’ There is a sharp juxtaposition between classes present here, though Mansfield does well to remind us that distinctions are merely constructs enforced in order to oppress and depress those who do not hold power in order to retain control of it. While the happenings around the party are a celebration of beauty and life, we see how death is always creeping in and the two cannot be truly separated. Mr. Scott dies just outside the gate when thrown from a horse, but even the gate cannot keep the inevitably of death away, such as how, when singing a song to focus on how beautiful her voice is, Jose sings about death with lines like ‘this life is weary, hope comes to die’ which serve almost as foreshadowing. But best is the description of the wealthy cottages with the poorer homes, existing practically right on top of one another yet depicted as such opposites: ‘True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all. They were little mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. In the garden patches there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans. The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans' chimneys. Washerwomen lived in the lane and sweeps and a cobbler, and a man whose house-front was studded all over with minute bird-cages. Children swarmed. When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might catch. But since they were grown up, Laura and Laurie on their prowls sometimes walked through. It was disgusting and sordid. They came out with a shudder. But still one must go everywhere; one must see everything. So through they went.’ The descriptions have you looking down your nose at them, so couched in the perspective of the Sheridan’s and their contemporaries. The juxtaposition is in everything, from the lushness and light of the garden party to the poorer homes always described in terms of darkness. While the Sheridan house is a world with trees ‘lifting their leaves and fruits to the sun in a kind of silent splendour,’ amidst ideal weather ‘without a cloud,’ the people at the Scott household are ‘a dark knot of people’ curling into a ‘gloomy passage’ or crowding a ‘wretched little low kitchen, lighted by a smoky lamp.’ Laura’s journey from the glow of the garden to the darkness of the Scott household seems like a journey into the underworld to see death firsthand and bestows an epic sense not unlike the Greek myths into the narrative. ‘People like that don't expect sacrifices from us,’ Mrs. Sheridan scoffs at Laura’s insistence their festivities are vulgar in light of Mr. Scott’s death, ‘and it's not very sympathetic to spoil everybody's enjoyment as you're doing now.’ Which is really the crux of this story–the working class must sacrifice everything to uphold the world of the rich but the rich will not lift a finger for them. To them the lives of those outside their circle ‘seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper.’ Worse, they validate their inhospitality and insensitivity by assuming the worst, such as Jose insisting the Scott family are drunks and blaming drinking on the accident despite any evidence. For the Sheridan’s even the rose bushes ‘bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels’ which touches on the idea that wealth was a sign of god’s grace and divinely deserved while the poor suffer out of sin. But this cruelty only pushes Laura towards empathy and embarrassment and her hat, a symbol of frivolity is suddenly garish in the space of death. ‘Forgive my hat’ she says, meaning forgive my family, forgive my class, meaning Laura has had her eyes opened. ‘What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things.’ A quick story, but one full of power and crackling with social critiques and class consciousness. Written in 1922 as Mansfield was slowly succumbing to tuberculosis, The Garden Party continues to impress and is a marvelous little story. 5/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 24, 2024
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Jun 24, 2024
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ebook
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1546171460
| 9781546171461
| 1546171460
| 4.51
| 962,595
| Mar 18, 2025
| Mar 18, 2025
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really liked it
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More like Sunrise on the WEEPING am I right!? A prequel of pain and punishment in Panem, Sunrise on the Reaping brings the blood, brutality, and betra More like Sunrise on the WEEPING am I right!? A prequel of pain and punishment in Panem, Sunrise on the Reaping brings the blood, brutality, and betrayal of the Capitol’s games back for another thrilling and utterly chilling edition of Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games series. Haymitch has always been my favorite and so I had high hopes for this installment. Dear Suzanne Collins, you delivered and more. Collin’s series signature critiques of propaganda, oppression and rule by fear and force come screaming through this novel where winning isn’t surviving. it’s just a different way to die.’ Set about 40 years after the events of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes yet with 24 years still to come before Katniss first steps into the arena in The Hunger Games, Sunrise unveils the tale of Haymitch Abernathy as he is plunged into a fight for his life in the 50th Hunger Games. The return of familiar characters from a new vantage point—Haymitch is 16 and ‘not a drinker’ at the outset of this novel—allows even stories we thought we knew a chance to reveal that Katniss and the reader’s knowledge of the past was largely filtered through government propaganda and the truth is much more horrifying. There is certainly a lot more reaping than sowing here, and though this novel seems rather hit or miss with fans I found this to be a page-turner of dark excitement and dystopian social criticism that draws us into an unsettling feeling of complicity in the violent voyeurism of The Games that, for all the brutal bleakness, manages to center the fragile humanity and will to endure in a way that keep the story from collapsing under the weight of burdens already well-trod in the series. A fast-paced and fun return to the gruesomeness of Collin’s dystopian vision, this is an excellent new chapter where moments will make you feel as if your ‘ heart breaks into fragments so small it can never be repaired,’ and Collin’s shows she still has the power to move audiences in new and surprising ways. Because you will never think of squirrels the same again. Sorry. ‘I’m entirely the Capitol’s plaything. They will use me for their entertainment and then kill me, and the truth will have no say in it.’ You know that quote from G.K. Chesterton how ‘Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist,’ but rather they ‘tell children the dragons can be killed’? Replace fairy tale with dystopian fiction and dragons with government and you get to what Collin’s is doing here. A key to good dystopian fiction is showing a behemoth of terrible might and power, but then showing how there is a weak point where the average person can topple it all. If they have luck and good friends on their side I suppose. While the original series felt like a warning against being moths to the flame of marketing media that upholds social inequalities prostrates us before the powerful, Sunrise arrives at a time where we’re already drowning in the muck and the mire. Yet Collin’s doesn’t wallow, in fact she seems to be slapping us with pages saying “STOP THIS, pay attention!” (which includes all the thirst traps of prequel Snow, stop it, sure he’s so hot but he’s an evil genocidal maniac so nah) and while the novel peers into the gloomiest, most gruesome corners of Panem to highlight the horrors within, there is a spark of revolutionary spirit just itching to catch light. Collin's has always had an excellent philosophical undercurrent to her tales and Sunrise upholds this intellectual weight. She even opens with a quote from David Hume that aptly sets the stage: 'Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.' Collin's gives a sharp look at the power of propaganda to reduce the masses to cattle in the eyes of the State, to give them entertainment to keep them occupied and to keep the oppressed down with marketing that claims they deserve their poverty. It is in keeping with what Roman poet Juvenal wrote around 100A.D. that 'everything now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.' And now we have kids killing each other in hopes they can put food on the table but are really just lambs for the slaughter. In an interview, Collin's discussed how the version of Haymitch we meet in the start of the original novel was 'misleading' and this book offers a better view of him and why he is. The key to her novel, she mentions, is Hume's concept of implicit submission which he defines as why people 'resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers' and how we can see a reflection of our current society in the world of Panem. As to the question why the many submit to the few in Panem, Collin's says Hume already answers this: 'We're allowing ourselves to be controlled by "opinion." And that's where propaganda comes in. All right, then. "What propaganda de we all consume on a daily basis that maintains this status quo? Is it harder to maintain in an autocracy or a democracy where we pride ourselves on our intellectual or political freedom? How much propaganda does it take to make you think that implicit submission is what you want? Is it inevitable? Is there a way to protect ourselves from it?' Collins also adds that the novel is also about 'the uncertainty of inductive reasoning, propaganda, love.' Because of the ways propaganda and misinformation worm through the narrative, Haymitch was the most logical choice to be the narrator and so begins our dark journey to the past and back to another of the bloody arenas for the Games. 'He who controls the media controls the minds of the public.' —Noam Chomsky The way Collins sets this up with astute parallels to the original trilogy is fantastic and while it is likely the darkest and saddest of the novels, it might well be the most rebellious. To know where things will end up by the era of Katniss only enhances the tension and terror here as we realize little Haymitch’s reward for not dying in childhood is an adulthood of depression and alcoholism leading to activism (can relate, buddy!). But while filling in these gaps in time Collins also emphasizes the gaps between the rich and the poor, the glitz and glamour of the Capitol overflowing with wealth where women can get literal cat ears modified onto their head with the harshness of the districts like 12 where Haymitch is bootlegging so his family can live off the meager pay. The impoverished contestants are less people and objects of disposable entertainment for those in the Capitol who objectify, sexualize, gamble on and bat nary an eye when they die. Things are not peachy in Panem poverty and all roads seem a rocky burden with no goal in sight. ‘And that’s part of our trouble. Thinking things are inevitable. Not believing change is possible.’ The story begins as the 50th Hunger Games is adding a new twist–double contestants for twice the terrible entertainment. This is the fateful games that ensnared Haymitch to toil as mentor for the rest of his life and with double the contestants Collins manages to pack in double the violence and trauma. We have a father made to mentor his own son knowing damn well he’s not gonna make it and Haymitch isn’t even reaped but a sudden death gets him tossed in anyways. Oh also the reaping is Haymitch’s birthday. Happy birthday, kid! ‘Nobody feels like having cake after watching two kids being hauled off to the Capital for slaughter.” Dead kids and deadly squirrels sure make for a fucked up read and while the novel often nudges towards torture porn (this one is BRUTAL, friends), that is actually a large part of the point–the Capitol’s annual funfest is just straight up torture porn maketed as a patriotic display of power. Snow, disease-ridden and fully leaning into his evil impulses, is an obdurate tyrant at this point dispensing cruelties for the sake of cruelty and hoarding enough power that nobody will dare lift a finger to stop him regardless of how monstrous his actions are. And his henchmen will always ensure ‘snow lands on top’ or it’s their heads. The erosion of checks and balances, the inability for the people to keep their leaders in check, leads to terror. Like, oh hey here’s a copy of the dead girl, you’re welcome! *shudders* ‘You don’t win the Hunger Games by playing fair. You win by knowing the rules better than they do.’ We always knew the games were bleak and fucked up. But whew does Collin’s really pull back the covers to reveal just how intensely fucked up we are talking about. Like real bad. No spoilers but if you thought everything was chance well…ask Plutarch about that because apparently he’s been here the whole time and Collins leads into some rebellion stuff that makes you realize it was far more orchestrated behind the scenes of playing dumb that occurs in the original novel. Haymitch in particular where being a drunk idiot nobody expects anything from is a great mask if you need to weasel your way in to light the fuse of revolution. It’s really great to see more fleshed out versions of side characters, though some great characters might just be absent…‘In fifty years, we’ve only had one victor, and that was a long time ago. A girl who no one seems to know anything about.’ But hey, at least the love interest in this one is also musically inclined. But whew love doesn’t seem to get much of a good break in this world. ‘They will not use my tears for their entertainment.’ It’s another year of the Hunger Games and as usual people are like “hey so this shit sucks and maybe we should stop it?” but really nobody ever does because trying has pretty unfathomably terrible consequences. And not just for you but your loved ones too. ‘Don't let them paint their posters with your blood. Not if you can help it,’ is good advice, but also a reminder that dying brutally with dignity is the only victory really, that the dying brutally part is just…it’s going to happen to you. Brace yourself, this book gets rough but is also surprising because what you thought you knew about Haymitch’s life was all under the wraps of government propaganda… ‘The Games must end. Here. Now. Every death reinforces the importance of the arena plot succeeding.’ Propaganda takes center stage in the social criticisms on the novel and Collin’s pulls in a lot of poetry quotes from the likes of William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe among others enhance the atmosphere but also remind us how much a pretty pairing of words can affect people. Of course George Orwell is always on mind with a quote at the ready for any good dystopian fiction too: ‘All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why.’ And don’t forget William Blake’s ‘A truth that’s told with bad intent, / Beats all the lies you can invent.’ We see how propaganda dupes a populace, how it coaxes submission, how it rubs out the feelings of empathy and humanity if we can cast the poor fighters as glamorous contestants of entertainment, but also how it can mask atrocities and secure power. The role of propaganda to grease the gears of authoritarianism is on full display in Sunrise, but so is the role of the revolutionary who must rise against it. The cost, however, will be great. ‘I love you like all-fire.’ Returning to the world of The Hunger Games was a real treat full of trauma but wow did I enjoy Sunrise on the Reaping. This one is harsh. This hits hard and had me feeling all the feelings with BIG SAD being a primary one of those feelings. A well crafted tale that earns its telling by making the long list of familiar names not merely fan service but an opportunity to reveal new truths, deepen the history, and expose the lies of the Capitol to see that it is somehow still even more sinister than we could have realized. This was a fun read and one that was impossible to put down and if Suzanne Collins writes anything Hunger Games, you best believe I’ll be there with bells on. 4./5 ‘The snow may fall, but the sun also rises.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 18, 2025
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Apr 2025
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Jun 07, 2024
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Hardcover
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1637583915
| 9781637583913
| 1637583915
| 3.29
| 312
| unknown
| Sep 12, 2023
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really liked it
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As culturally awash in irreverence and irony as it was clothed in stonewash jeans, what better way to tap into spirit on the 1990s US youth scene than
As culturally awash in irreverence and irony as it was clothed in stonewash jeans, what better way to tap into spirit on the 1990s US youth scene than to harness the profane towards something profound. Alex Kazemi’s sardonically satirical New Millenium Boyz comes violently alive as a 90s period piece—I’m sorry to anyone who may have grimaced thinking of the 90s as long enough ago for such a thing—that drags you through the darkness of the foul-mouthed, cynical toxic masculinity of an era right as the Columbine massacre is sending shockwaves through the country. This book, which has been targeted by book banners, is shocking itself, though the almost suffocating depictions of misogyny, homophobia and crass cruelty never feels played for shock value but rather an damning indictment of how such rampant vulgarity was normalized in many corners of society and only festered in its own filth as the expansion of internet access gave it a wider outlet. Dark and gruesome, New Millennium Boyz won’t be for everyone, nor does it need to be and—truthfully—there were times where the bluntness of its brutality had me questioning if it was even for me but I can’t deny I was strongly impacted by this and that the discomfort is part of the understand. Kazemi successfully captures the dark side of the 90s and pulls off a satirical cultural indictment in a novel that has created a bit of a scandal but ultimately reminds us to reject a toxic masculinity that teaches ‘caring is so embarrassing,’ or a romanticization of apathy and cruelty. Before we go any further, I’d like to thank Permuted Press for providing me with a copy in exchange for a review and also apologize for my absurd tardiness in reviewing the book. I’d like to claim I was just being an unaffected cool 90s kid who didn’t believe in timelines but the truth is I’m trash at actually doing anything I should be reviewing. But I was intrigued when I saw the novel had been blurbed by Bret Easton Ellis as ‘my favorite millennial provocateur.’ This is high praise from someone who has notably feuded with Millennials in the press, such as saying ‘what is millennial culture? … It kind of disturbs me,’ in an interview with The Sunday Times of London in 2019 before stating ‘where is the great millennial novel? There isn’t one.’ It seemed Ellis has now found one he can smile upon, and it is a smart blurb as it may seem lazy to compare this to Ellis’ works like American Psycho—especially for the ever present immersion in pop culture, darkness, and violence in both books—but it’s also an accurate and productive comparison. I’m glad I read this as it isn’t one I’d probably have reached for, but I recall a time as a teen living amongst peers that talked and acted like many of the teens in this book and it would have fit right into the sort of “edgy” media I was consuming then. What Kazemi does best is truly capture the vibes of the 90s, from the turmoil to the feelings of rapid change amidst great prosperity that tried to push aside the lower class while romanticizing being tough, edgy and disaffected. It was a time where the term “alternative” reigned supreme with Alternative music, alternative tv networks like MTV, alternatives to everything as the internet opened up access and going “against the grain” became the cool thing to do. Kazemi spent 10 years working on this novel, largely honing his skills to recreate the speech of teen boys and that comes across quite effectively. And while it is very pop-culture heavy—referencing the current culture was HUGE in the 90s—it isn’t kids saying “eat my shorts!” shouting “booyah” or saying “talk to the hand” but leaning in to the 90s cynicism of being as crass and profane as possible. This is the culture that made Bob Saget famous for saying the filthiest things possible, mind you, and whew the dialogue is indeed foul. You've been warned, but its presented this way for a much greater purpose than mere crassness. I took a college course once on how media and culture reflect each other where I learned how the popular performance art of any era is a gold mine for cultural artifacts and commentary on values of that decade. I recall a lecture on the 90s leaning heavily on how shows like Seinfeld or Friends marked a shift from family-based sitcoms to one of “found family,” or how Seinfeld takes a rather mocking tone towards people outside their group and a lot of jokes barbed against ideas of inauthenticity. But we also have MTV, heavily present in this novel, which glamorized the lifestyles of the rich and famous while also bringing shows like Jackass which popularized pranks and handycam antics. The show featured a lot of fairly mean-spirited humor and people getting hurt for laughs, a social acceptance that Kazemi’s characters are intensely aware of. The character Lu, for instance, is never without his camera always hoping for the moment that will be his big break. It's through these cultural references we get to the heart of the issues. Kazemi spoke on this in an interview with Document Journal recently: ‘ I wanted to mock and satirize, and pop culture became a vehicle to do that. Obviously, I take it to such an absurdist, exhausting degree to depict how brainwashed millennials were by corporate Boomer pop culture.’ In the 90s it was the epitome of cool to be disaffected, ironic, self-referential and cynical with music and movies glamorizing the idea of the “cool loser” (Beck song Loser is very indicative of white culture at the time). Being authentic and “not a poser” or “a sellout” was championed. This image was something corporate marketing teams staffed by Boomers were pushing on teens, capturing the idea that sex and violence sells but then turning around and shaming teens for being too sexualized, too violent, too cynical and “ruining the national morality” sort of thing. It’s like in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat's Cradle where in order to control people they invent a religion and then ban it in order to ensure everyone will want to practice it in private rebellion. I grew up too late to be amongst these characters, but I recognize in them the culture my friend’s older siblings lived in. ‘We romanticize that era for its simple truths,’ Kazemi says, ‘but there’s so much darkness in it.’ It was a time of great growth but also turmoil, which we can see in hindsight how the unsustainability of the era smashed its face into a brick wall of the new millennium as the dot com and housing bubbles burst and 9/11 changed everything. That spiral towards an inevitable bad end can be felt on every page here though. The story of New Millennium Boyz follows Brad as he realizes the normalcy of suburban life is always teetering on the edge of a cesspit of violence and debauchery. ‘What is the fucking point of being alive if my life doesn’t fit the vision I have of myself in my mind,’ he wonders and sets out to seek a fulfilling life. After a teen-movie-trope summer of camp, finding a sweet girlfriend and losing his virginity suddenly gives way to something more like a punk music video as he befriends Marilyn Manson-worshiping Shane and nihilistic Lu (which is either short for Luke or Lucifer) who will do anything to shock the system. But leading a double life of polite Brad and Badboy Brad becomes to much as the trio descend as far as possible beyond decency in hopes of overnight fame. ‘I’m becoming a prophet, an icon, and I don’t even have to move to Hollywood.’ What occurs is rather alarming and while it has shock value it is using the shock to expose and criticize. ‘I think that it could be interpreted that like, I just wrote a bunch of shock porn,’ Kazemi admits in an interview with Daily Beast, ‘But I think if you zoom out, I’m trying to talk about the escalation of the behavior and a culture that is sort of encouraging their worst impulses.’ If media and culture reflect each other back to each other, what we find here is a feedback loop amplifying itself into an ear piercing pitch of violence and cruelty that became so embedded in toxic masculinity. ‘I think, because a lot of my generation likes to romanticize goth culture—Manson, Nine Inch Nails and stuff—I wanted to expose it for being just another aspect of the ‘bro’ culture. You know, just cause Manson was wearing lipstick and all, it doesn’t change the fact that he was a part of that very male culture.’ You’ll remember exactly why it has become so necessary for a social pushback against misogyny, racism, homophobia and all the various bigotries that casually spew from the mouths of these characters. Not that times are perfect now, but it is unsettling to remember just how accurate the horrible language was even when I was in high school. And just using homophobic slurs so casually as a general insult. I’m also reminded of a song from the 90s from Third Eye Blind (who apparently are still a thing based on my google search just now) called Slow Motion. Deemed too vulgar to make the album—their album Blue contained an instrumental version that I liked to play on guitar with a friend who played the piano parts—the lyric version that appeared online does make me think of this book. The song is a litany of horrors, drugs and violence but ends as so: ’Hollywood glamorized my wrath Much in this way we see how this descent into the worst of human impulses are misguided teens internalizing media in a harmful way. After Columbine, which is present in the novel, everyone was quick to blame video games and music. ‘The Columbine era destroyed my entire career at the time,’ singer Marilyn Manson has said in interviews, his music largely being targeted as a “cause” of the violence. Much debate ensued at the time if media caused violence or exacerbated violent urges in kids and many concerts were cancelled. Mason argued this unfair blame only made it worse for kids who were already bullied for being different. ‘The media has unfairly scapegoated the music industry and so-called Goth kids and has speculated, with no basis in truth, that artists like myself are in some way to blame. This tragedy was a product of ignorance, hatred and an access to guns. I hope the media's irresponsible finger-pointing doesn't create more discrimination against kids who look different.’ Similarly, author Stephen King’s novel Rage, which he wrote in high school about a school shooting, was found to be on the reading list of multiple school shooters and lead him to discontinue publication of the book saying: ‘My book did not break [these teenagers] or turn them into killers; they found something in my book that spoke to them, because they were already broken…Yet I did see ‘Rage’ as a possible accelerant, which is why I pulled it from sale. You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it.’ I bring this up because New Millennium Boyz has been found to be rather controversial, landing on book ban lists and being flagged by conservative content review website BookLooks—which is associated with the group the SPLC deemed a “hate group”, Moms For Liberty— as “a 5/5 aberrant content rating” with a 33-page document of pull-quotes as to why (read more on this here). The issue here is that representation is not the same as condoning and as already discussed the troubling aspects of the novel are intended to capture the ideas in order to criticize them, or, as Kazemi said in Interview Magazine, ‘there’s no sense of glamorization about any of it. I’m actually exposing it and reprimanding it.’ Which feels adjacent to the idea that media depicting violence begets violence and poses the question if representation of bigotry in order to push back against bigotry thereby begets bigotry. A rather intense and uncomfortable book but for the sake of using the discomfort to examine a much more uncomfortable and violent cultural issue of the 90s, New Millennium Boyz is certainly a very affecting novel that achieves its goals. Rife with pop-culture references and a selection of songs that would rival any I Love the 90s CD, this plunges the reader through a horrific ride of 90s culture and cynicism where you can practically taste the soda-can bongs stuck with a needle everyone was smoking out of behind the high school. Thank you to Permuted Press for a chance to read and review. ⅘ ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 07, 2024
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May 07, 2024
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May 07, 2024
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Hardcover
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1542093570
| 9781542093576
| B07VFMFPP4
| 4.01
| 33,529
| Sep 17, 2019
| Sep 09, 2019
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really liked it
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‘To save the world, people had to think differently.’ What will our planet look like 100 years from now, or maybe 1000 or a million years? Tapping into ‘To save the world, people had to think differently.’ What will our planet look like 100 years from now, or maybe 1000 or a million years? Tapping into the anxieties of climate crisis, economic collapse, wars and societies structure around endless profit chasing instead of equitable and sustainable systems, N.K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning story Emergency Skin offers a startling and subversive look at the distant future. Here we discover earth has long been abandoned and left for dead by those deemed the best, brightest and strongest of humans when they set out to form a new planet deep into space. ‘We left because it would’ve cost too much to fix the world,’ they tell us believing in the principal that it was ‘cheaper to build a new one.’ But on a secret mission to return to the abandoned planet there is a startling discovery that earth might not have collapsed into a tragic wasteland as once thought, and perhaps the “perfect” society that has abandoned bodies and embraced eugenics might be lying about a lot more. A short and sharp story from a master storyteller of speculative fiction, Emergency Skin is a hopeful look towards the future imagining a society that values cooperation and survival for all. ‘Six billion people working toward a goal together is much more effective than a few dozen scrabbling for themselves.’ Jemisin excels at fascinating framing to her stories, taking what would otherwise feel like an overly philosophical look at community organizing and equitable structures but crafting it into a riveting sci-fi tale that teases out big reveals and tension. There is a certain kinship to the stories of Ursula K. Le Guin here in the way it is sociology by way of sci-fi, almost like a reversal of The Dispossessed if the people from the extreme neoliberal planet instead arrived at the anarchist society and had to make sense of it from their context. This would need a lot more nuance to expand as a novel but as a short story its pretty fun. The framing here—the constant chatter of someone from the traveller’s society speaking to him through his suit—allows us to experience the shock and disgust of their society when faced with the workings of a world they left behind assuming it would perish. It doesn't tell you what the focal character says, but Jemisin gives enough context that you can assume without confusion. The great fun of the story is that, without those who opted for profit over people and didn’t value anyone beyond the strongest and wealthiest, there was actually an opportunity to save the planet when they realized they had to get along or perish. ‘The problem wasn’t technological…people just decided to take care of each other.’ Jemisin hits a lot of big themes in social justice ideas, particularly ideas of mutual aid, inclusivity and accommodations for all. There is the pushback from the narrator who scoffs at their social choices because they ‘find such chaos ugly and inefficient,’ and we see the contrast between theories of efficiency being one that actually upholds a sustainable society or one that only values a select few at the expense of others. They realize that what divided them most were the things also threatening survival and the abolition of these social structures allowed them to thrive and cooperate. ‘We realized it was impossible to protect any one place if the place next door was drowning or on fire. We realized the old boundaries weren’t meant to keep the undesirables out, but to hoard resources within, And the hoarders were the core of the problem.’ I love the irony that the people who abandoned them were the problems all along. I love that Jemisin can create stories like this that hit on so many ideas while still making an engaging story that manages to not feel jumbled and I especially love how effortlessly her world building works. Sure it is all a bit heavy handed and idealistic without nuance, but it’s also pretty fun to read and the frustrated reactions of the "narrator" are rather enjoyable. Emergency Skin is a satisfying little romp through the stars and into brighter futures and well worth the quick read. 3.5/5 ‘Some will fight for this, if they must. Sometimes that’s all it takes to save a world, you see. A new vision. A new way of thinking, appearing at just the right time.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 05, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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0375701877
| 9780375701870
| 0375701877
| 4.05
| 80,794
| May 18, 1953
| Sep 12, 2013
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it was amazing
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‘Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live.’ I found myself stranded in Chicago over the weekend due to a blizzard and sub zero tempera ‘Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live.’ I found myself stranded in Chicago over the weekend due to a blizzard and sub zero temperatures and kept busy doing what I love best: visiting art museums and bookstores. While browsing the basement of After-Words, I discovered a copy of Baldwin’s first published novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain stickered with Chicago’s One City, One Book initiative and figured no better time than to finally read this beloved classic by an author I’ve recently come to love. It was a perfect choice and companion as I read it traveling over the hills and everywhere for my harrowing journey home on various trains and buses that kept breaking down. To read the works of James Baldwin is to encounter prose that lingers like a prayer on your lips, prose that you’d suspect could be picked up on a seismograph for the way it shakes you deeply within, prose that could feasibly crack open the world. And to read Go Tell It On the Mountain is to bask in the bitter beauty of an undeniable classic of religious trauma, queer desires, and grappling with family legacy. Published in 1953 and introducing the literary world to a writer who would go down in history as an essential author, Go Tell It On the Mountain is a semi-autobiographical work that truly comes out swinging. Baldwin confronts issues of racism, sexuality, sin and the hypocrisy of religion being harnessed to uphold oppressive patriarchy and other abuses while flooding his pages with gorgeous passages on desire and struggles for selfhood. Brilliantly condensing decades of lives struggling to survive society and themselves all within the span of a narrative set over 24 hours, Mountain also condenses a vast American experience into the corridors of Harlem and the blocks around the aptly named Temple of the Fire Baptized. Here we experience 14 year old John’s internal tribulations to either accept the endless struggle up the mountain of holiness—‘ It’s a hard way. It’s uphill all the way’—or a rejection of the church altogether. Yet the scope of the novel rests beyond the boundaries of John and, through flashbacks and visions, the novel becomes one about the legacy of John’s family and the struggles of Black Americans everywhere in the 20th century. ‘There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.’ Taking its title from the popular spiritual tune, Baldwin immerses us in a family and community for whom the church encompasses the whole of their daily existence. In many ways this felt like a good companion read to Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in its depiction of an insular community that uses religious devotion and fervor to justify incredible amounts of abuse and castigate not only queer desires but any sexuality outside of marriage. At the heart of the story is John who is expected to walk in the footsteps of his father—or so he thinks Gabriel is his father—and become a preacher. Gabriel is the personification of Christianity in the novel with Baldwin representing his criticisms of the organized religion through his portrayal of Gabriel as hypocritical, misogynistic and abusive. He is also very imaged-based, with his coming to God informed by the opportunities of social positioning as is his first marriage to Deborah—once she is considered the holiest of the community—a calculated move to be seen as holy himself. Baldwin represents religiosity as a false front, one that uses piety to mask abuse. ‘salvation was finished, damnation was real’ Baldwin demonstrates how religion is used for purposes of control within the community, or for Gabriel over his family. The fear of sin is pervasive, such as the novel opening with John feeling he will ‘be bound in hell a thousand years’ for his act of masturbation, and used to control behavior. Especially of women or young people, as we see in the early pages when Elisha and Ellie May are publicly shamed for ‘walking disorderly’ as evidence they ‘were in danger of straying from the truth.’ Gabriel sees it as his duty to uphold moral standings in his congregation, though not in himself, and John worries it may already be too late to be saved so he feels the need for salvation all the more intensely. However, he recognizes Gabriel as a gatekeeper to salvation and that he cannot ‘bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father,’ which is something he feels he cannot do having recognized Gabriel as a cruel abuser who beats his children and “fondles” his own daughter. ‘ The menfolk, they die, and it's over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.’ Baldwin also represents how Christianity upholds patriarchy through the rather misogynistic double standards against women. Sexuality is a taboo and while sex outside marriage is considered unthinkable, Gabriel had a child out of wedlock, Royal, who he discards feeling he is unholy and not worth his life, and thinks of the mother, Esther, as a ‘harlot’ for having accepted sex outside marriage and entered into ‘a forbidden darkness.’ Similarly, Deborah was shamed after having been the victim of sexual assault by a group of men—like the story of Medusa, the victim is the one who bears the punishment—and was only acceptable to society if she devote her entire being to holiness ‘like a terrible example of humility, or like a holy fool.’ She comes to hate all men and sees ‘they live only to gratify on the bodies of women their brutal and humiliating needs.’ The men hide behind claims of religious superiority, chastizing women for the things they do themselves, and thus religion only becomes another pillar reinforcing patriarchal abuse. For John there is the issue of ‘a sudden yearning tenderness for Elisha... desire, sharp and awful,’ a desire he has been taught is filthy and thus internalizes it to believe himself filthy and unworthy of salvation. ‘Dust was in his nostrils, sharp and terrible, and the feet of saints, shaking the floor beneath him, raised small clouds of dust that filmed his mouth. He heard their cries, so far, so high above him—he could never rise that far. He was like a rock, a dead man's body, a dying bird, fallen from an awful height; something that had no power of itself, any more, to turn.’ Baldwin probes at the long history of homophobia in religious communities, an issue that continues to this day and studies have shown a greater risk for internalized homophobia, rejection from family, mental health risks and suicide for LGBTQ+ youth in religious households. This theme of struggling to accept a gay sexuality as natural was explored in depth in Baldwin’s later novel, Giovanni's Room, where David’s internalized shame leads to self-destructive tendencies and outwards abuse to others. ‘The rebirth of the soul is perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.’ Still further we see how religion is used to justify greater atrocities, such as John’s vision of the biblical story of Ham was used to justify slavery. The novel also explores how the legacy of slavery still casts a vile shadow over the country and racism runs rampant. There is the unjust treatment of Richard arrested for theft despite being innocent and simply a Black man at the wrong place and the wrong time (not unlike the Dylan song) which leads to his tragic end. There is even internalized racism, with Deborah seeing Gabriel’s dark skin as a sin which nudges the long, racist legacy of associating Blackness with evil. This is all tied in with Gabriel being born from a former slave, showing how the cruelties and abuses of slavery continue to manifest themselves for generations to come. ‘You in the Word or you ain’t - ain’t no halfway with God.’ These experiences are the ones John considers in opposition to his need for salvation. His rejection of the church becomes, ultimately, a rejection of society at large and all the racism, homophobia, misogyny and abuse. Yet it is hard to imagine beyond the bubble of the church, which thinks of itself as a safe haven from all the sinners and “undesirables” they pass on their way. He feels trapped and helpless, and his frustrations with the futility of cleaning the rug—a never ending task—is symbolic of the path up the “mountain” to holiness. This is also symbolized in his climb to the cliff in Central Park: ‘He did not know why, but there arose in him an exultation and a sense of power, and he ran up the hill like an engine, or a madman, willing to throw himself headlong into the city that glowed before him. But when he reached the summit he paused; he stood on the crest of the hill, hands clasped beneath his chin, looking down. Then he, John, felt like a giant who might crumble this city with his anger.’ He comes to see life as an endless struggle beleaguered by sin, yet runs down the “mountain” anyways. ‘If it’s wrong, I can always climb back up,’ he thinks. Yet still he must go to the threshing-floor to be judged, and hopes he can be found righteous. ‘It was his hatred and his intelligence that he cherished, the one feeding the other.’ This is a powerful novel, one that devastates in theme, exhausts you in its moral burdens, yet utterly enchants you in pitch perfect prose. Go Tell It On the Mountain is a marvelous microcosm of society at large in the day-long drama of a mass and generational struggles of a family that put Baldwin on the map. He would fulfill this early promise time and time again. Personally I felt rather outside the novel, not having much experience with being immersed in a religious community, but I know many who’s stories of their own upbringing rang in harmony with the book. This is a harrowing tale that takes dead aim at society, hypocrisy and abuse and delivers heavy blows. 4.5/5 ‘Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead; how, all garments rent and cast aside, the naked soul passed over the very mouth of Hell. Once there, there was no turning back; once there, the soul remembered, though the heart sometimes forgot. For the world called to the heart, which stammered to reply; life, and love, and revelry, and, most falsely, hope, called the forgetful, the human heart. Only the soul, obsessed with the journey it had made, and had still to make, pursued its mysterious and dreadful end; and carried heavy with weeping and bitterness, the heart along. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 16, 2024
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Jan 16, 2024
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Jan 16, 2024
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Paperback
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037460987X
| 9780374609870
| 037460987X
| 4.01
| 25,127
| Jun 06, 2023
| Jun 06, 2023
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it was amazing
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‘I feel more like a person than ever because I’m starting to hate myself.’ I’m a big fan of cats, and the big cat narrating Open Throat by Henry Hoke h ‘I feel more like a person than ever because I’m starting to hate myself.’ I’m a big fan of cats, and the big cat narrating Open Throat by Henry Hoke has certainly stolen my heart. Examining the blurred boundary between human and animal, Hoke’s heartfelt and often hilarious novella follows the stream-of-consciousness of a queer mountain lion based on P-22, a real-life mountain lion who crossed the 405 and the 101 freeways to live in Griffith Park. This is a novel that seems like it shouldn’t work, yet it does. And marvelously so, making elements that could quickly trip into cloyingly quirky instead rise up in emotional and satirical glory. Hoke’s sharp yet playful prose comes at us in double-spaced, single lines, reading almost like poetry as the lion navigates complex emotions from hunger and shame to repressed desires and concerns around identity, but their perspective (the lion tells us they are they/them) also gives us a fascinating gaze at human society from the perspective of an outsider on our gross inequalities, narcissisms and ecological terrors. A quick but powerful read, Hoke’s offbeat Open Throat makes the familiar seem strange and the strange so utterly satisfying through the eyes of an unforgettable and tender narrator that, while an animal themselves, explores what it means to be human, themes of domestication, and removal from the wild. [image] P-22, the “Hollywood Cat” This is a wild ride. A quick book that could feasibly be finished in a single evening, Open Throat’s unconventionality manages to pull a wide range of emotions and insights through the narrative while keeping the reader in rapt attention. While we never learn the name of our feline narrator because ‘it’s not made of noises a person can make,’ we are treated to a deep investigation into their emotional state and concerns for society. I was delighted to learn how much of this story comes from real events about P-22, to whom this book is dedicated and inspired by (Hoke says the story was also inspired by the song Hollywood from Nick Cave, which reminded him of P-22). Its a similar feeling to when I’m reading Ali Smith and think ‘that is an oddly specific detail’ only to find it is entirely true, and the true events on the life of this lion are just as thrilling as the novel such as P-22 taking up residence under someone’s porch or having been the likely culprit in the devouring of a beloved LA zoo koala. In her eulogy for P-22, California director for the National Wildlife Foundation Beth Pratt said: ‘He changed us…He made us more human, made us connect more to that wild place in ourselves. We are part of nature and he reminded us of that.’ This keys into a major theme of the novella, though as much as the lion makes us think about our humanity, the lion, in turn, feels they are becoming more human. A therapist is ‘something I want,’ for instance, though they also find annoyance in human behaviors. ‘I don’t trust screens to tell me who I am,’ they think upon seeing their reflection in a mirror. ‘I want to devour their sound / I have so much language in my brain / and nowhere to put it.’ The narration is made possible by the lion having picked up on human speech, either from the encampment of unhoused people for whom the lion feels an affinity for their shared outsider status or from the people hiking the trails.Sure, this may be a stretch for some but Hoke handles it in such a delightful way with situational irony and malapropisms that defamiliarizes the ordinary into an uncanny landscape where the abstractions of reality are more pronounced for analysis. Learning the language draws them closer to humans and I giggled at aspects such as picking up the word for helicopter but always as ‘fucking helicopter’ due to learning it from a man in tent city, or mistaking the term ‘scarcity mentality’ for ‘scare city’ which becomes an all-too-accurate name for LA. ‘I traded old fear for new fear.’ Becoming more human also means processing internal struggles (a theme I’ve quite enjoyed in the Murderbot series). In many ways this story is symbolic of repressed identities and the ways society commodifies everything to take the bite out of it. Watching two men have sex in a cave dredges up bittersweet memories of a “relationship” the lion had with another lion, ‘the kill sharer,’ but also the traumatic memories of being cast out from their lion society by a violent father. ‘A father to a kitten is an absence,’ they reflect, ‘a grown cat to a father is a threat.’ This vague tale of violence and abusive fathers is a familiar queer trope, and Hoke juxtaposes the history of violence with the violence present in human society. And not just the threat of death to cross the freeway—‘the long death’—but also violence humans display against their own outsiders such as an act of horrific cruelty towards the unhoused people the lion clings near. ‘I know what their hands can do and what their hands would do and the violence waiting behind every motion.’ I’ve never eaten a person / but today I might.’ The story also looks at the ways society will take anything raw, wild, or unfamiliar and commoditize (think of how capitalism will often co-opt activism in order to render it as nothing but slogans on t-shirts) or domesticate it, such as the imagery of a wild mountain lion becoming a half-starved, tame and timid creature slinking through the streets of scare city. A lion is a perfect symbol for a book set in hollywood, which is full of icons like the MGM lion or Simba that take a wild beast and turn it into family friendly marketing. Disney in particular is called out in a surreal scene late in the novel that briefly envisions the lion in full anthropomorphic adaptation walking on two legs and enjoying the rides of Disneyland. There is a bit of irony that in the most notable moments of domestication when a teenage girl takes in the lion, she also pays homage to their wildness, calling them ‘heckit’ (the mythological Hecate associated with ideas of transition) and refers to them as a goddess. ‘If you feel alone in the world / find someone to worship you’ Though for all the ways the lion sees humans as perpetuating many of the world’s ills, there is also that affinity and tenderness many of them. Particularly the outcasts. Though, as we see in the shocking ending, the world of humans and animals are always separate. Open Throat is a reminder of the violence that gets swept under the rug or the other sacrifices made in order for the masses to pretend we live in a polite society and is an excellent edition to the genre of animal perspectives showing us what being human really looks like. I also can’t wrap this up without mentioning that I will forever read novels about pumas in honor of Mike Puma, some of you here may remember him, a best friend that I miss every single day. Love you buddy. Anyways. Offbeat, humorous and often surreal, Open Throat is an endlessly readable tale that reminds us to embrace the wilderness and wild because society can never truly cage it. 4.5/5 Cause they say there is a cougar that roams these parts, With a terrible engine of wrath for a heart That she is white and rare and full of all kinds of harm And stalks the perimeter all day long But at night lays trembling in my arms. -Nick Cave, Hollywood ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 10, 2024
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Jan 10, 2024
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Jan 10, 2024
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Hardcover
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1916751008
| 9781916751002
| 1916751008
| 3.60
| 5,212
| Mar 01, 2022
| Aug 06, 2024
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really liked it
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The quest for the idealized life has long tempted and eluded the human mind and while Eva Baltasar’s Mammoth offers a scorching criticism of such an e
The quest for the idealized life has long tempted and eluded the human mind and while Eva Baltasar’s Mammoth offers a scorching criticism of such an endeavor destined to end in disillusion, her work is illuminated in what could certainly be an ideal prose. The third in her triptych of novellas, following the equally unhinged, emotional tempests found in Permafrost and Boulder yet still fully accessible as a stand-alone read, Mammoth once again places us in the mind of an nameless, queer woman narrator as she grapples with the volatility of finding her place in the world. Desiring a child and fed up with life in the ‘ripened, self-corrupted’ city, she flees to a remote village in the Catalonian countryside believing ‘the phrase to do without may be the thing that frees me.’ Though the utopian image of rustic living and returning to the basics might crack in the cold reality of living as the narrator finds a wildness within herself full of violence. As with each of the triptych, Julia Sanches delivers an excellent translation into English and each page crackles with purpose. A brutal confrontation of the fetishization of rural life by city dwellers, the crushing weight of expectations on women, and the harsh realities of survival pull the reader through Mammoth as Baltasar yet again flays the reader with a pristine prose, sharpened and deadly succinct in its critical aim. ‘I go through hell and find it thrilling. I can’t get enough of this feeling—of my heart pulling the trigger and shooting.’ Beginning with the epigraph ‘an idea hungers for your body,’ by poet Les Murray, Baltasar—an accomplished poet in her own right—brings us into the headspace of a woman who finds her body to be commodified by the society around her. It is a common thread in the triptych, each featuring a different narrator yet the nameless aspect (unless otherwise nicknamed for a defining feature that affixes them in the minds of those around them such as the titular Boulder or, here, being referred to by her rural cottage name Llanut) grants a universality to each of these queer women and their difficulty maneuvering in a patriarchal society. Their relation to sexuality and, ultimately, motherhood is also a uniting theme, like a gravitational center pull each into orbit from the nannying positions in Permafrost that end abruptly in a new responsibility thrust upon her or the resistance to her partner’s journey to motherhood in Boulder. Mammoth, however, launches us directly into the narrator’s desire to have a child—though this is more honestly simply a ‘desire to gestate’—and a planned fertility party under the guise of her 24th birthday celebration. It is an urge like leaping into oblivion without any wish for a partner where ‘’any one of them would do’—a phrase I attack myself with and have to endure,’ and the brash nature of this headlong venture marks her general engagement with the world. ‘I’d been living in a drowning city, and I need this—the restorative silence of a decompression chamber.’ In the city she finds ‘a sterile, impenetrable life locked in ice,’ her body commoditized by for-profit labor she finds dehumanizing on all fronts. She frequently quits jobs and stresses over the ways the labor force uplifts the rich at her expense. ‘I lasted a few days at each job and left just as I was starting to get the hang of it, terrified I would become used to the exploitation…when I worked to someone else, I gave them the most precious thing I had, more precious that my time or body, more precious even than the meaning of the word itself: my dignity.’ Working for the university interviewing elderly patients in senior-care she also finds her dehumanizing labor to become an act that dehumanizes those around her, something that is later paralleled where the violence of humans and animals in rural living begins to spread into violent actions from her. ‘Reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime. I hate my tool, the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people who, at the end of the day, had somehow persuaded life to put up with them all those years.’ In interview for Granta with Irene Solà, Baltasar, who herself lives in a rural Catalonian village near the mountains like the narrator moves to here, admitted ‘I’ve never been able to love a city,’ and this anxiety pours out of our narrator. Her Barcelona apartment has proximity to the zoo that allows her to hear the lion’s ‘ancient, roaring sorrows,’ something that she feels growling within her trapped in the city and identifying with ‘the singing of caged birds.’ Feeling city living has driven her into anhedonic despair, she sets out seek an idealized life in a small rural community. ‘Feeling alive means shouldering the burden’ Baltasar takes aim at rural tourism and the fetishization of ‘simple living,’ demonstrating the reality of hardship in such communities and the annoyance of those who merely visit as some self-serving “quest” but do not truly value such a life. The sort of city folks with J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘not all those who wander are lost’ quote on stickers attached to cars or water bottles who come to see the sights or, worse, abandon old cats that the narrator then has to deal with in increasingly unhinged and disturbing ways (trigger warning for those where feline violence is a dealbreaker). The narrator is not unlike them at first though, thinking the rural silence will give her the ability to live ‘cleaved to the rock like a root, sucking up nutrients until every finger, every tooth, every last one of my thoughts is worn through,’ and idealizes an ascetic lifestyle. ‘I like the thought of a house without a real bathroom,’ she tells herself, ‘the pigsty-messiness of it. I like that I have to focus on the essentials. How the need for a bathtub drives away all my more trivial thoughts.’ She makes bread feeling like she has tapped into her roots and ancestral heritage of breadmaking. It comes out poorly but she eats it anyways. Had this novel been written in the US one might find it to be a criticism of the trad-wife culture and traditional living social media influencers. Baltasar has different aims, not only critiquing the city folks (or ‘big pond’ people as the shepherd, the closest thing to a friend she has there, calls them) idealizing the rural landscape, treating it as their entertainment, leaving their trash behind—‘I’m starting to understand the hostility towards big pond folk’—but also disillusioning such an image of rural life. . It is a brutal book and will make one consider that ‘There is no desirable life.’ ‘The land belonds to life and life is the animals.The only purpose of humans is to steer and exploit them just enough to eke out a living.’ A rural citizen herself, Baltasar shows the harshness, the violence towards animals hidden from city folk who merely eat the food without seeing how it comes to be on their store shelves, and also the patriarchal structures and misogyny that aren’t just confided to the city. Just like the city, labor in the rural communities feeds the strong at the expense of others. In this case animals like the shepherd's lambs. We also see the narrator objectified, asked to engage in sex work for the shepherd (which she accepts in her pursuit of a child), and their disagreements often turn violent. We see the violence and cold of the land seeping into her, The use of language is incredible too. In the early stages of the book living in the city she assesses herself through animal metaphors but later, in the rural life, through metaphors of weapons or objects with connotative violence such as feeling like a ‘rusty fish hook.’ People tend to be often compared to animals as well, from the senior-living community seeming ‘ferret-like’ and when sexually entangled with the shepherd she notes ‘his semen had the same manure-like aftertaste as the lamb.’ Baltasar’s prose is exquisite at every turn, moving through intense introspection to searing indictments of society with deft, devastating linguistic power. Julia Sanches does an excellent translation here, as she has with all Baltasar’s novels and her work on Boulder found it shortlisted for the Booker International. While being interviewed for the prize, Baltasar shared her joy at working with Sanches: ‘She knows me, my writing, and my terrain; she knows when the path is flat and when the dunes are variable, and she knows how to take up and translate the landscape of my writing, which in her hands becomes a shared space where the two of us meet. A translated novel is always a co-authorship, and I am lucky to share this with Julia Sanches.’ I cannot overstate how incredible her writing is. Even the title is well done, and though the titular beast does not make an appearance we are reminded of it (or more so its absence) in lines like ‘I don’t care whether I live or go extinct,’ or just simply the mammoth amount of expectations placed on women in society. Though my favorite is the idea of a mammoth living in caves and how our narrator thinks about the ways modern living responds to the exhaustion of work and society through our own modern idea of caves: ‘You lose the ability to think of anything but the basics: hunkering down in one place for as long as it takes to eat and then, when the day is done, sheltering in some hole from the dark and the inclement weather. Thousands of years ago, we referred to these holes as caves. Now we call them leisure, exercise, social media. We retreat to our depressing cells and feel smug, convinced we are the lucky ones.’ While this novellas are short and most one-sitting reads, they completely overpower you with prose and leave the reader breathless, bruised, and eager for more. ‘Nothing is mine, except me.’ A bleak and brutal yet rather beautiful novella, Eva Baltasar dazzles with the sharp critiques and unhinged survival mechanisms in Mammoth. While perhaps Boulder remains my favorite, this was still a wild ride of poetic delight and scathing wit. Like the warning of assuming the grass is always greener on the other side, Mammoth lampoons the belief in an idealized living, critiques both rural and city life, and presents a quest for motherhood in harsh tones that are destined to sink right into the reader’s heart. A fantastic little book from a fantastic writer. 4/5 ‘I call for everything that was once mine to be turned over to life, for it to find a path of its own in this bitter, inhuman life, because it isn’t mine anymore.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 10, 2024
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Paperback
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0241207029
| 9780241207024
| 0241207029
| 3.79
| 24,093
| Nov 02, 2017
| Nov 02, 2017
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it was amazing
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‘Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we’re supposed to be seeing.’ The winter months are a time of cold and dark, but also a ‘Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we’re supposed to be seeing.’ The winter months are a time of cold and dark, but also a sense of beauty and calm in the muffled silence of a world blanketed in wet snow. The winter ‘invites a turning in, a quieting, an upped interiority,’ writes Nina MacLaughlin in her essays on winter, and it is in this introspective spirit of the season that Oscar Wilde asserts ‘wisdom comes with winter.’ But there is a duality to winter, for there is also the harshness, the chilling reminder of our frailty and mortality, and often we withdraw indoors and into ourselves. The political metaphor is right there for the grasping and Ali Smith manages to take and transcend it brilliantly in Winter, the second book of her seasonally thematic tetraology. The prose of Winter drifts down through puns and politics (there’s enough wordplay here to make Nabokov and Pynchon envious) as the novel becomes a kaleidoscopic expression of the essence of winter. Yet it is so much more than that, functioning as an investigation into the interplay of art, identity, truth, beauty and culture on social levels both political and personal as well as an effective publishing experiment to capture a current moment of social discordance as it unfolds in real time. It is a tale of British politics and British artists, yet it also feels a universal exploration of truth and beauty in a time of great anxieties. Set during the days surrounding Christmas and matching the intimacy and interiority of the season, Winter is as sharp and insightful as it is comical and redemptive and makes for the perfect cozy winter read. ‘That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.’ While this is the second of a four-set seasonal trilogy, Winter could still serve as a standalone. That said, there is a thematic unity with the previous book, Autumn, beyond capturing a literary expression of it’s titular season. Smith deftly knots past and present on both personal and political levels and garnishes the political landscapes in narratives of under-recognized women artists (the inclusion of Barbara Hepworth here isn’t as pronounced as that of Pauline Boty in Autumn yet her artistic story is still deeply integral to the themes) and fraught family dynamics. The fallout of the Brexit vote is less a backdrop and more the landscape upon which the narrative plays out, and Smith manages to position the reader in almost real-time of the events taking place. The story is set Christmas 2016 though by the end we have references to the Grenfell Tower fire and Donald Trump telling a crowd he will make retail employees say “merry christmas” at an October 2017 event with Winter being published just a month later in November. [image] Barbara Hepworth This is particularly impressive as this event leads to a perfect closing statement in the novel, one that is a play on the final lines of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to mirror the playful opening reference. I had read Smith’s God is dead, to begin with as a great punchy opening only to watch later that day, Christmas Eve no less, a favorite Muppets adaption of the book and when the banter over the line ‘The Marleys were dead, to begin with’ came I had a eureka moment. I enjoyed how this was in keeping with the opening line of Autumn being a play on the opening to A Tale of Two Cities. The novel works within the framework of Dickens’ holiday classic as the story slips seamlessly into hauntings of Christmas past and visions of the future—‘That's one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once’—complete with a seasonal spectre of a floating child’s head. ‘Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition.’ - Nina MacLaughlin The plot, as far as there is a “plot” in an Ali Smith, is a bit of a riff on a whole slew of familiar christmas narratives. Arthur, or Art—a name that’s usage in the book would seem heavy handed in lesser hands but the consistency of Smith’s witty and whimsical wordplay miraculously makes it work—hires Lux to be play the role of his recently ex-girlfriend, Charlotte, for a holiday trip to his mother’s in Cornwall. The Hallmark rom-com vibes are especially enhanced when Lux insists they phone mother Sophia’s estranged activist sister, Iris, to join them. And so the family drama and false personas all descend upon Cornwall (which was particularly charming to me because it nudges my absolute favorite rom-com film, About Time) and the family friction is bound to spark fire. ‘It isn’t a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We’ve got to come up with a better answer.’ But this is a Christmas story at heart, and Dickens and all his holiday hoopla is not the only classic work integral to the Winter. William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline becomes a redemptive touchstone as fake-Charlotte/Lux, a Croatian woman with an uncertain future in the mindfield of Brexit laws shows a greater love of English literature than those of birthright citizenship, elucidates the plot almost as a metaphor for present day politics. ‘[Characters] living in the same world but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become disjointed or broken off each other's worlds. But if they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what’s happening right next to their ears and eyes, they’d see it’s the same play they’re all in, the same world, that they’re all part of the same story.’ The telling of the story is an emotional turning point in the novel, especially juxtaposed with Sophia’s defense of her vote to leave the EU, with the reader clearly recognizing the importance of ‘a play about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning,’ but also Lux’s admission she came to the UK because of the way Shakespeare could take that and end it with balance and grace where ‘lies are revealed and all the losses are compensated.’ Smith ingeniously uses literary and art criticism as expressions of her own works, such as Sophia’s impressions of Hepworth’s sculptures: ‘It makes you walk round it, it makes you look through it from different sides, see different things from different positions,. It’s also like seeing inside and outside something at once.’ The way her structure weaves in and out of perspectives, memories, visions, etc. lets us move about the story from a variety of vantage points. It isn’t just a family narrative, or a Brexit narrative, but a narrative of individual struggles, of political activism of the now and Iris’ history protesting nuclear stockpiling, of single-motherhood after giving up the love of one’s life for ones own life (view spoiler)[and having a child with who is plausibly Daniel Gluck from the novel Autumn, though he is only referenced briefly as Danny here (hide spoiler)], and of all the hopes, dreams, fears, flaws, and possible futures a human life can have. I just need to interrupt the flow of this review because I need to scream that this book is just so unbelievably good. Honestly, thinking about it makes me want to weep it’s just so good. There’s so much I can’t fit into this review but like, the way a remembered story is an amalgamation of two different storytellers and the implications in that, of the history of the anti-nuclear protests, or the ways Smith puts you in the minds of the two characters who are indifferent to the Brexit vote so a lot of the story is tongue-in-cheek but in a way that really slaps…this book is miraculously good. Okay I just needed to say that because this book is just intensely beautiful in a way that makes all the shit that life can be seem worthwhile to know a human can make something like this. ‘We all mine and undermine and landmine ourselves, in our own ways, in our own time.’ Truth, lie and beauty are central to the story. People living as characters of themselves are rampant in the novel and Smith nudges the way internet culture and personalities are more marketing than authentic selves. We see how truth has fallen second fiddle (Charlotte is a violin virtuoso, supposedly) to stories that satisfy, how we trade facts for useful details, and posturing for clicks replaces authenticity. ‘It is the dregs, really, to be living in a time when even your dreams have to be post-postmodern consciouser-than-thou.’ ‘There was furious inteolderace at work in the world no matter when or where in history’ And so we asked ‘into who’s myth do we choose to buy?’ There is a literal sense, such as buying Sophia’s products that are new but made to look vintage, or the duality of present day Boris Johnson versus Samuel Johnson’s fight for reality, ‘A man interested in the meaning of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.’ Sophia calls Iris a “mythologizer,” though under Smith this seems more a compliment than anything else, Smith who is in turn mythologizing the Brexit era. Do we believe the government, or do we believe Iris and her friends trying to expose political and corporate corruption and pollution harming people. And this is why we have art. ‘I said, Art is seeing things. And your aunt said, that’s a great description of what art is,’ Smith playfully writes about Art’s hallucination, though it also hits home the idea that art mythologizes reality in order to see, process, and understand it better. And such is the purpose of Winter. And why artists are valued over politicians, because artists represent the human at the cost of power. ‘He thinks about how, whatever being alive is, with all its pasts and presents and futures, it is most itself in the moments when you surface from a depth of numbness or forgetfulness that you didn't even know you were at, and break the surface.’ The French writer and philosopher Albert Camus once wrote ‘in the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.’ Such is the lesson here, that in this season of cold, of withdrawing, or introspection, we can choose to release ourselves from the shackles of the characters we choose to present ourselves as and find the beautiful summer of truth and hope within us. This is a gorgeous novel, one that moves slowly yet surely through both the heart and mind and balances both the personal and political in a way that transcends them both. Winter, like Autumn before it, is an impressive expression of its season and a story that warmed my heart like a yule log during the holidays. I only hope winter passes quickly so I can read the next seasonal installment. 4.5/5 ‘Mind and matter are mysterious and, when they come together, bounteous.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 31, 2023
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Jan 2024
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Dec 31, 2023
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Hardcover
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166802778X
| 9781668027783
| 166802778X
| 3.88
| 1,540
| Oct 17, 2023
| Oct 17, 2023
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really liked it
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‘She is stilled by the knowledge that she will emerge from this isolation a one woman show.’ This is such a unique and creative book that asks how can ‘She is stilled by the knowledge that she will emerge from this isolation a one woman show.’ This is such a unique and creative book that asks how can one present the entirety of a life. What artifacts and still frames from our collection of days could best be arranged to tell the story of our existence? For Christine Coulson, who spent twenty-five years writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, what better way to show a life than as a museum exhibit, which she does brilliantly in the quirky yet gorgeous novel One Woman Show. The focus of this exhibit is Kitty, living from 1906 to 1999, and her life is presented entirely through museum wall label texts with a few bits of overheard gossip from throughout her life sprinkled in for a bit of seasoning. Through these snapshots of her life—all written with a wry wit mimicking discussions on artistic themes and presentation while employing a clever and well refined lexicon—we see Kitty who ‘was raised as a prize—a pretty thing entitled to pretty things’ by wealthy parents enter into a tumultuous adulthood with the Great Depression and WWII rending all pre-planned futures asunder, go through multiple marriages and be a bit of a scandal amongst high society. Through the framing of a museum exhibit, One Woman Show is an effective and creative experiment that examines how women are often garniture in their own lives, being considered precious objects in a collection subject to appraisal from society. ‘Even at age ten, Kitty senses a suffocating tyranny on the horizon. Not the war in Europe, but the fragile need to be forever cared for according to someone else’s tastes and appetites.’ This is such an intriguing little book and Coulson—who wrote the wall labels for the MET’s British Galleries—successfully manages to probe a great depth of character and nuance through her miniature expressions of a person as a work of art. It is a quick book with each page being a single “piece” in the collection and given a single, succinct paragraph. For example: “BULLFIGHTER, AGED 44, 1950 Mrs. Luis de Braganza (known as Kitty) Collection of Luiz Carlos Alfonso Antonio de Braganza Ex-Collection of Martha and Harrison Whitaker; William Wallingford III Traveling exhibition Rejecting the vernacular during a visit to London, Kitty champions the canon in a discreet assignation with Picasso during the second of his two trips to England. The artist's legendary appetites are no match for Kitty in full force. She seduces with industry and abandon, replacing traditional modes of expression with robust techniques based on curvilinear forms. Picasso, awed by the stark and savage edges beneath Kitty's gilding, handles her as if she were made of bronze.” Its clever but never falls into the trap of substituting substance for format and becomes a rather incisive way to both follow Kitty’s story but also address aspects of society. While this one is listed as a ‘traveling exhibition,’ we often see the character’s represented as belonging to various collections, such as Kitty belonging to her parents private collection, and later each of her three husbands. We see how Kitty is quite literally an object on display, a high society woman who must live ‘within the confines of its pillowed virtue’ that become rather stifling. The text is playful, with character’s value appraisals changing along with events and new details about their persons and the composition of each display comes loaded with implications about the people and events depicted. Coulson should be praised for sustaining the style throughout while being always enjoyable and insightful as well as knowing how to keep the novel short enough that it doesn’t overplay the technique. It manages to avoid seeming like a gimmick and more like unique artwork. ‘What are we girls but farm animals once we get married off?’ Objectification of women is a predominant theme in the novel, and we see how Kitty’s “value” is attached to whatever “collection” she is currently a part of. Her first marriage to Bucky is high quality, with museum cards for each bridesmaid that shows them all in a bit of surprise to find Kitty the centerpiece of a wedding collection instead of themselves marrying into Bucky’s Philadelphia fortune, but also shows the how for people of this status, love and marriage was more a business deal than actual affection. ‘Someday, I might really like you’ he tells Kitty on their wedding night. But her value changes in the collection, especially as a solo piece as a widow, or when she divorces her second husband (‘His highly polished veneer cannot conceal the violent carcass to which it is attached.’). The novel also looks at how women are harshly judged in society for aging, with Kitty being less valued by everyone around her in her advanced age, or how her lifelong habit of stealing small objects is sort of charming in youth but viewed as creepy when she is older. Kitty is quite a dynamic character, being quirky and a bit of a scandal (having been rumored to have slept with Picasso when he painted her) and her life takes us through many major events of the 20th century. I enjoy how she has a love for words as well. Coulson manages to address heavy topics in playful ways, such as how she combines Bucky’s bafflement at Kitty’s vocabulary with a somber moment when Kitty accepts that her multiple miscarriages are a sign she will never have children (and therefor never a “collection” of her own). She says there will be ‘no surfeit of babies after all,’ and he, not understanding what many of her words mean, responds ‘who needs surfing babies anyways.’ Coulson keeps the story moving quickly and lightheartedly without sacrificing depth. One Woman Show is an exciting and entertaining read that takes art criticism and shifts it’s gaze to human life. It is a fast read but you come through feeling like you’ve experienced much more beyond the mere length of pages. A great look at society, patriarchy and a must read for lovers of art and museums. 3.5/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Oct 20, 2023
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Hardcover
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